JACKI LYDEN, host:
There's a reason so many 19th century American buildings share a certain grandeur, a certain look. They were designed or inspired by the architecture firm of McKim, Mead and White.
Charles McKim, William Mead and Stanford White designed the New York Municipal Building, the original Penn Station. They worked on the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, Rhode Island. They were even hired to renovate the White House in 1903.
These days, Stanford White may be better known for the scandal associated with his murder. He was shot by the enraged husband of a former lover. But 100 years ago, White and his partners were creating the look of a booming young nation.
Architecture professor Mosette Broderick has written a new book about the famous firm. It's called "Triumvirate: McKim, Mead and White Art Architecture, Scandal and Class in America's Gilded Age." She says that this quintessentially American firm derived much of its inspiration from Europe at a time when taking a boat to Paris was no easy thing.
Ms. MOSETTE BRODERICK (Author, "Triumvirate: McKim, Mead and White Art Architecture, Scandal and Class in America's Gilded Age"): Through the 1860s and '70s, it was an ordeal to cross the Atlantic. Later on, the crossing gets much safer. Mm-hmm. And much more comfortable. And you can even start to bring big stuff back from Europe because you're not in a little boat anymore. And Europe becomes an awakening for a new nation. We were basically - when McKim, Mead and White were getting going - we were basically a rural nation with little wooden houses in the country - not country houses.
LYDEN: Yeah.
Ms. BRODERICK: Simple brownstones. And they go to Paris and they see the First World, they see the old world. They see things that are medieval, things that are baroque, things that - Roman Amphitheater in Arles. And all this patrimony comes down on their heads. And McKim and White - and to some degree even Mead - see themselves as a huge Santa Claus with a backpack. And they put the buildings and the style and the things that they can buy in this backpack and bring it to the Americans who feel by the end of the 19th century that they're ready to become a first world nation. And they become the bridge between the old world and the new.
LYDEN: Once they were done touring the continent, these three young upstarts had to make a name for themselves in New York society.
Ms. BRODERICK: How in the world did three guys who are basically losers from families that were not well-off or well connected, how did they make it? And that's what's so amazing. It was - some of it is blind luck, and some of it was the social friends they made in the clubs. The clubs were in those days -University Club, initially later, Century Club. They were the conduit. When you look at the jobs they have, the members...
LYDEN: They're networkers, terrific networkers.
Ms. BRODERICK: Exactly.
LYDEN: And, of course, Stanford White is perhaps the best networker of them all.
Ms. BRODERICK: He was a - that is true. He was a man who could literally be in four places at once.
LYDEN: Tell us about White, I mean, he's just a remarkable character. He's so talented. He brings in so many clients, which is we're talking about...
Ms. BRODERICK: Yeah.
LYDEN: ...is the original networker because...
Ms. BRODERICK: Yes, he was. He was ubiquitous, as they said.
LYDEN: And we should also say, amongst these men, his best friend, Augustus Saint-Gaudens...
Ms. BRODERICK: Gaudens.
LYDEN: ...there's a lot of bisexuality.
Ms. BRODERICK: There is. There's no question that when they were touring in Italy, something was going on.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm.
Ms. BRODERICK: Whether it actually happened - and later on, I think it did happen. In the 1880s, White was...
LYDEN: Well, they'd write each other and say, I send you a thousand kisses.
Ms. BRODERICK: Kisses.
LYDEN: Most men don't.
Ms. BRODERICK: If you see those letters...
LYDEN: Yeah.
Ms. BRODERICK: ...they're very clear.
LYDEN: And I raise it because it is simply a fascinating part of their character and creativity.
Ms. BRODERICK: Well, the story about White was he was a child. He's Peter Pan of the "Peter Pan principle." In his early years in the 1880s, he still had some architectural flair. I think he loses this.
Later on, he becomes a decorative specialist. It's all about interiors, and then he discovers the booty of Greater Europe. But he doesn't know anything. He never endured an art history course. He never took a connoisseur class at Christie's or Sotheby's. He really didn't know what he was doing. It was all enthusiasm.
LYDEN: What is their legacy today, Mosette Broderick?
Ms. BRODERICK: I'll tell you what it is, I think. They were working for the new money. They didn't do very well with the Edith Wharton set.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm.
Ms. BRODERICK: They worked for new money. And the new money wanted to be barons, and these buildings made them barons.
And I wanted to call the book - the title was the editor's decision, and a good one. But what I wanted to call it was "When Architecture Could Fashion A Nation." And that's what McKim, Mead and White thought they were doing.
LYDEN: We are going to go today to the old post office...
Ms. BRODERICK: Wonderful.
LYDEN: ...the Farley Post Office...
Ms. BRODERICK: Yes.
LYDEN: ...34th Street on 8th Avenue.
Ms. BRODERICK: Yup.
LYDEN: And that's one of their commissions.
Ms. BRODERICK: Yes, it is.
LYDEN: We're going to explore unused parts of that building.
Ms. BRODERICK: Good.
LYDEN: Can you tell us anything about it?
Ms. BRODERICK: That was done by a man who was known as McKim's right-hand man, a man called William Mitchell Kendall, a Boston architect of very dull quality, and an extremely mean man.
LYDEN: And, of course, the motto - who comes up with this? - neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Whose is that?
Ms. BRODERICK: That's William Mitchell Kendall, is said to have defined that motto and put it on the post office.
LYDEN: That's Mosette Broderick. Her new book is "Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White - Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class In America's Gilded Age."
And you can read an excerpt of it on our website.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
The Chanel boutique at 31 Rue Cambon in the heart of Paris is a glittering shrine to fashion and fragrance. And the most famous fragrance there is number cinq: Chanel No. 5.
(Soundbite of advertisement)
Ms. CATHERINE DENEUVE (Actress): A woman is not all the time the same. Sometimes, we are very cooperating, but sometimes, we are very difficult. But being difficult is possibly being cooperating, no? So let's have a pact, just you and Catherine Deneuve. Don't ever change anything. Chanel No. 5 never has. There are no words for this mystery. We know what it is, Chanel.
LYDEN: Thanks to the lure of ads like that, someone buys a bottle of Chanel No. 5 every 30 seconds. It's been a bestseller for almost 90 years.
That lure also hooked author Tilar Mazzeo, whose new book is called "The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume."
While powerful women have always regarded Coco Chanel's creations as the embodiment of style, to understand her signature scent, Mazzeo says you have to look back to her childhood at an austere medieval convent.
Ms. TILAR MAZZEO (Author, "The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume"): She was essentially abandoned by her father after her mother's death, and raised in a convent in the southwest of France. And there are two things, I think, about the convent that are very, very important for her.
One is that because it's Cistercian - and the Cistercians believed in the symbolism of numbers - the number five in particular was all around her.
LYDEN: Hmm.
Ms. MAZZEO: So I think that's the origin of her interest in the number five, which...
LYDEN: She believed that that was her lucky number, her sacred number?
Ms. MAZZEO: Her lucky number. Well, even her fetishistic number was what one of her other early biographers who knew her said. So that was part of it.
And then the other part of it is because it was a convent where the focus was on cleanliness and on the scent of soap and linens and fresh-scrubbed skin, I think that also was a register of cleanliness that really influenced her interest in scent.
LYDEN: So later on when she started to think about perfume, in the first decade of the 20th century, there were real class lines about who wore what kind of scent. Would you tell us about that?
Ms. MAZZEO: Yeah. It was really a large distinction between them. If you wore jasmine, you were a racy lady. That was really associated with actresses and prostitutes and ladies of the night.
LYDEN: Mm-hmm.
Ms. MAZZEO: What a respectable young lady would wear would be rose or violet. So there was a really clear demarcation between the two kinds of perfumes.
And one of the things that's interesting then about when she goes on to create Chanel No. 5 is that she was a kept woman by a series of different people, and there was one of the other courtesans that she really admired because she always smelled clean. And that was what she didn't like about the other kept women that she knew is that they always smelled somehow to her dirty, you know, too much musk and too heavy perfumes.
And so what happens in Chanel No. 5 is it takes the heavier scents of musks and jasmine and rose, and then it balances them with adding this scent of clean and that, you know, that thing that makes your nose tingle.
LYDEN: It's also in its own way a marketing sensation. She creates buzz for it - well, today, we call it buzz. How does that happen?
Ms. MAZZEO: Yeah. She - so the perfume is invented in 1920.
LYDEN: Around Grasse, the famous French...
Ms. MAZZEO: That's right.
LYDEN: ...perfume capital.
Ms. MAZZEO: Right. In the south of France.
And then what she does is she begins a whisper campaign to launch it. She's very, very clever as an entrepreneur. And so she takes it and sells it only in her boutiques in the beginning, and plans to give it as a Christmas gift to her best clients at the end of the year.
And when they love it, can, you know, they say, we love the perfume, can we get more? She says, oh, I never had the idea that I was going to sell this. This was just a little gift. Do you really think I should sell this perfume?
LYDEN: Meanwhile, she's wiring to Grasse, make more.
Ms. MAZZEO: Right. Make more. I need to sell the perfume. And so it becomes very, very successful immediately in her boutiques, and she's already at this point at the height of her celebrity.
LYDEN: So she signs away her rights to this. She has such a tangled relationship with the perfume after that. Why does she sign away her rights to the perfume?
Ms. MAZZEO: Yeah. For me, that's actually one of the most interesting things about the entire story is that - because she ends up having a love-hate relationship with the perfume afterwards.
So she, in 1924, decides that in order to distribute it, she will give away the rights to a group of investors who are perfume distributors and manufacturers. And her concern seems to have been that she didn't want anybody to have any control over the fashion house. And so basically what she said is, it's your perfume, you deal with it.
LYDEN: And, of course, she couldn't possibly have known that it would be as successful as it was.
Let's talk about what happens in World War II to her, the perfume. There, the story becomes like a spy thriller.
Ms. MAZZEO: It really does. So the investors who buy the...
LYDEN: The Wertheimers. They are...
Ms. MAZZEO: Right. And the Meyers and the Heilbruns(ph).
LYDEN: French Jews.
Ms. MAZZEO: Right. So they're French Jews, and so they end up of course, when the war begins, having to flee. The Wertheimers in particular flee to New York and produce Chanel No. 5 here.
LYDEN: In Hoboken.
Ms. MAZZEO: In Hoboken, yes. Which Chanel's comment was, it's monstrous. They produced it in Hoboken. And she didn't know about this. So they begin producing Chanel No. 5 during the war here. And actually, what happens that turns Chanel No. 5 into - and changes it from being just a really famous perfume into being an icon, is the intuition that the investors have to sell the perfume through the U.S. Army in the commissary. It's really that decision more than anything that transformed Chanel No. 5 into this international icon during the Second World War.
But in order to make the perfume in the United States, they still make it with ingredients from France. So there's this great - there's a quote where someone says, it's a real James Bond story, and it is. They have to smuggle jasmine out of the south of France and bring it back to New Jersey in order to be able to produce the perfume.
LYDEN: But it's almost like having bars of gold during the war and just after. And you have photos in your book of GIs lined up, and of course the Nazis wanted it too.
Ms. MAZZEO: Yeah. That's for me one of the most interesting things about the perfume is that you think about the ways in which it encapsulates the history of the last century, right? It's - because Coco Chanel is pretty clearly anti-Semitic. I mean, there's not any getting around that.
I mean, not only does she have a German lover and live in the Ritz during the Second World War, but she'd had two lovers before that, both of whom had pretty proto-fascist politics.
And you think, well, you know, you've got a perfume created under the name of an anti-Semitic fashion designer. You have a perfume house that is in fact run by a family of French Jews. You have a product that American GIs line up in those photos in the book to get, and then that the Nazi officers also line up to get. I mean, it just cut completely across all of the boundaries of that war.
LYDEN: Like almost nothing else, except maybe smoking a cigarette.
Ms. MAZZEO: Cigarettes, whiskey, and Chanel No. 5, that was pretty much it.
LYDEN: Yeah. Tilar Mazzeo is the author of the new book "The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume."
Thanks again for joining me.
Ms. MAZZEO: My pleasure.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
We caught a cab over to the Farley Post Office, built in 1912 across the street from Penn Station. Another McKim, Mead and White building, now sadly gone.
The post office, however, is a vast structure, taking up two city blocks. You can still ascend its grand staircase to mail a letter, but there's very little left going on inside.
Mr. NICK CARR (Blogger, Scouting NY): I love the fact, among many, that you walk by it every day and you have absolutely no idea that 95 percent of it is completely empty. I mean, I think most...
LYDEN: That's Nick Carr. He's a film location scout and blogger. In fact, we first discovered the post office emptiness through his website, and he's agreed to come with us on a tour of the Farley Post Office's secret spaces.
Our tour guide is Tim Gilchrist.
Mr. TIM GILCHRIST: (President, Moynihan Station Development Corporation): This was the mail sorting, the general mail sorting facility. And what you're looking at right now is where the future train hall will be.
LYDEN: Gilchrist is the president of the Moynihan Station Development Corporation. We're catching this building at a moment of transition. The vast sorting hall is dim and empty now. But in a few years, after a lengthy civic struggle, it will finally be full of busy commuters.
Mr. GILCHRIST: And this will serve all of the Amtrak service throughout the Northeast Corridor.
LYDEN: Tim Gilchrist leads us deeper into the building.
Mr. GILCHRIST: What you'll see on the left here is the markings of the old jail cells when this was used by the postal inspectors.
LYDEN: Okay. So I would love to think that that's because somebody lost my personal letter from my boyfriend, but I assume why was there a jail cell, in case someone tried to hold up the post office?
Mr. GILCHRIST: Well, this is where the postal inspectors - for mail fraud, or if people were, you know, there was unfortunately a problem with an employee, or someone had assaulted an officer.
LYDEN: With 5,000 people, anything can happen.
Mr. GILCHRIST: But also, carriers worked out of here, and they were basically federal police.
LYDEN: Yeah. This is really like a city within a city, isn't it? I mean, with over 5,000 employees...
Mr. GILCHRIST: Two square blocks, safes, vaults, cafeterias, nurses' stations, medical facilities.
LYDEN: Up several clattery staircases, down an endless forest of corridors, it started to get dark. The evening sun is fading, and there's no electricity in this part of the building.
Nick Carr pulls out his iPhone to light our way to the medical wing, which didn't defend only against germs.
Mr. CARR: This, if you read real close, and I would love to know when this was built, it's the Electropel, Incorporated, electronic bird repeller. And it says 52 watts, 45 amps. And I would love to know when that was built. I can only assume it was to shoo away pigeons with the use of a little zap every once in a while. And that's just...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CARR: You know, you're never going to see this again. This is a one-of-a-kind piece. But to me, it's just fascinating because, you know, for a hundred years, this was the epicenter for keeping all 4,000 people healthy in this building and sort of you can almost feel like the souls of those people still walking around today. There's so much history to it.
LYDEN: Absolutely. And as we're looking out the window, you know, the sun is going down, there's two classic New York water towers framed by either window. It's just beautiful, kind of a photographer's paradise.
Up on the fourth floor, there's an annex built in 1934. Gilchrist shows us one last special glimpse of an era gone by.
Mr. GILCHRIST: The stonework that is really not visible to anybody in the public that is on part of the old Farley building just below the fifth floor roofline.
LYDEN: Beautiful. So we're looking at kind of a frieze below this copper roof on a brick wall. And peeking out just above it is, of course, the Empire State Building. What a beautiful secret classic New York scene. And it's, for right now, our secret and yours too.
In a few years when the public does come here, it'll be aboard a train, once again hurtling into a terminal designed by McKim, Mead and White.
Our thanks to Tim Gilchrist and Nick Carr. You can see some of Nick's photos of the Farley Post Office on our website, npr.org.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
The Republicans who take control of the House on Wednesday say they'll try to ban earmarks. But for every bridge to nowhere, there is an earmark that is filling a need. Fort Drum in Upstate New York is the only army base in the country without its own hospital. Soldiers and their families rely on civilian doctors and clinics.
David Sommerstein of North Country Public Radio recently visited the organization that helps find that care, an organization created by an earmark.
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN: Denise Young looks out her office window and grins. It overlooks Watertown's Public Square, the hub of Fort Drum's host city. And there's a fresh foot of snow.
Ms. DENISE YOUNG (Executive Director, Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization): As you can see right now, it's all lit up for Christmas and it's beautiful. We really feel like we're at the heart of the action that's happening in the Fort Drum region just by being here.
SOMMERSTEIN: Young directs the Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization. It's been all action at Fort Drum this decade. Thousands more soldiers, tons of new construction, all to support constant rotations in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Young says because there's no hospital on post, the community health care system had to step up.
Ms. YOUNG: When a soldier gets deployed, he deserves to know that his family here in our community is going to be taken care of. They are serving us, and we need to serve them.
SOMMERSTEIN: So five years ago, an earmark from then-congressman, now secretary of the Army, Republican John McHugh, created Young's organization to become the glue between the military and civilian health care worlds. It connects soldiers with private practice physicians.
Stephanie Burke's family moved to Fort Drum last spring. At military hospitals on other bases, she says her medical records were lost. She says assigned doctors didn't know her children's names or histories. At Fort Drum, she says it's better.
Ms. STEPHANIE BURKE: My husband - first things when he got processed, I remember he called me on his cell phone. And he's like: Wait, you get civilian doctors. You're going to go off-post and you get to choose who you want to go to. And so we are very excited about that.
SOMMERSTEIN: The Health Planning Organization's also working on a military-wide problem; a shortage of mental health clinics to deal with PTSD and the effects of multiple deployments on families. It's helped triple the number of mental health providers in the region. And still, that's barely keeping up.
Retired soldier Jim Sheets is studying to be a social worker in a program brought here by the Health Planning Organization. He says half the students want to become mental health counselors.
Mr. JIM SHEETS: You're going to have 20 people who's right back in this area providing services.
SOMMERSTEIN: The Health Planning Organization also has grants to digitize medical records, recruit doctors and run fiber optic cable between the region's five hospitals. Director Denise Young says a $400,000-a-year earmark has leveraged $100 million in projects.
Ms. YOUNG: The earmark is the catalyst to bring all of these resources to bear in this region to improve the health care system.
SOMMERSTEIN: Thirty miles away, Dr. Steve Lyndaker rushes though the halls of Louis County general Hospital.
Dr. STEVEN LYNDAKER (Lewis County General Hospital): It's my gofer day where I go for this, I go for that.
SOMMERSTEIN: You can argue that all these changes around Fort Drum would have happened without the earmark. Lyndaker disagrees. He says someone needed to bring big institutions like hospitals and the Army together.
Dr. LYNDAKER: We wouldn't be talking about this quite honestly if Denise Young didn't write a grant proposal.
SOMMERSTEIN: Across the country, rural areas suffer from a shortage of doctors, especially specialists. Democrat Bill Owens will be the one defending the Fort Drum Regional Health Planning Organization's earmark in the next Congress. He says the group has helped this region try to buck that trend.
Representative BILL OWENS (Democrat, New York): When you do this, you improve the health care for both the military community and the civilian community,
SOMMERSTEIN: Director Denise Young says her organization transcends politics. It takes care of the people who fight for our country, and she says she's absolutely confident it will survive the battle over earmarks.
For NPR News, I'm David Sommerstein in northern New York.
(Soundbite of song, "Discoverer")
JACKI LYDEN, host:
R.E.M. is hoping to get a whiff of the sweet smell of success with their new album, "Collapse Into Now."
(Soundbite of song, "Discoverer")
R.E.M. (Music Group): (Singing) Hey baby, this is not a challenge. It just means that I love you as much as I always said I did.
LYDEN: This track is called "Discoverer." It's from R.E.M.'s first record in three years, and it's one of the most anticipated new albums of 2011.
Stephen Thompson of NPR Music joins me now for a preview of some of those records.
Hi, Stephen.
STEPHEN THOMPSON: Hello, Jacki.
LYDEN: Hi. It's nice to listen to R.E.M. again.
Mr. THOMPSON: It is. It's been a few years.
LYDEN: Yeah. These guys have got to be in their 50s by now, but this is a really muscular sound.
Mr. THOMPSON: Yeah. I think there was a stretch kind of in the early part of the last decade where REM was putting out some very, very tepid records. And I think the last couple, including this one, are a little bit more rock-sounding, and that's refreshing.
LYDEN: Let's hear a little more.
(Soundbite of song, "Discoverer")
R.E.M.: (Singing) Might have made a little less mess. But it was what it was; let's all get on with it now - discoverer.
LYDEN: It'll be a hit, my prediction.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LYDEN: That's new music from R.E.M. The album "Collapse Into Now" comes out in March.
Stephen, I know you're really excited about this next band. I really love listening to them. They're a duo from Baltimore called Wye Oak. What can you tell me about them?
Mr. THOMPSON: This is one of my absolute favorite bands. It's a man and a woman, just two people. Jenn Wasner is the singer and guitarist with a wonderfully sort of mysterious delivery. It's kind of hard to decipher her lyrics. And it gives the music kind of beauty and mystery all kind of rolled into one.
And the other member is a guy named Andy Stack who plays drums and keyboards. When you see it live, he plays them simultaneously. And it's a very, very rich, full but still beautiful sound.
LYDEN: Yeah. A young band. I really like them.
Mr. THOMPSON: This is Wye Oak. The song and the album are called, "Civilian."
(Soundbite of song, "Civilian")
WYE OAK (Music Group): (Singing) I don't need another friend when most of them I can barely keep up with. I'm perfectly able to hold my own hand but I still can't kiss my own neck.
LYDEN: That's Wye Oak with the title track to their forthcoming album "Civilian," also due out in March.
And so Stephen, moving on to an artist with a lot of buzz around him right now. He's an English electronic artist by the name of James Blake. Let's listen.
(Soundbite of song, "Lindesfarne II")
Mr. JAMES BLAKE (Singer): (Singing) (Unintelligible).
LYDEN: Now, of all the things you gave us to listen to, I found this the most experimental. Is this Lindesfarne?
Mr. THOMPSON: Yes. Lindesfarne II. There's a part one and part two of this particular piece. Yeah. James Blake is 21 years old and is a very popular sort of up and coming producer of a kind - of a style of music called dubstep.
LYDEN: Dubstep?
Mr. THOMPSON: Yeah. Dubstep - it's basically a style of almost production as much as performance where it involves sort of slowing down and kind of staggering out beat so everything feels a bit off kilter. And it creates a certain tension in the music. I'll put it this way. It's very difficult music to dance to.
(Soundbite of "Lindesfarne II")
Mr. JAMES BLAKE: (Singing) (Unintelligible)
Mr. THOMPSON: You know, he's been producing all of these records that have been enormously popular sort of in underground circles. And what has been very unexpected, I think, for a lot of people is he's put together this - his first full-length record comes out in February, and he's singing all over it and obviously, as you hear on that track, sort of mutating his vocals, you know, using a vocoder and creating this very dark, slightly unsettling but very, very beautiful sound. Kind of - like I said about Wye Oak, there's a certain mystery to what's going on here that is really grabby.
LYDEN: I think it's a really sort of (unintelligible) song for, you know, 21. It's really evocative.
Mr. THOMPSON: It doesn't sound like a kid, that's for sure.
LYDEN: No. And that was James Blake, and his new self-titled album comes out in February.
My guest is Stephen Thompson from NPR Music, and we're getting a sneak peek of some of the big new releases of the first couple months of 2011.
Staying in the UK, another singer - she had a big debut album three years ago, and I love women who sing like this. This is the sophomore release from Adele. Let's hear some of her.
(Soundbite of song, "Rolling in the Deep")
ADELE (Singer): (Singing) There's a fire starting in my heart reaching a fever pitch it's bringing me out the dark. Finally I can see you crystal clear. Go head and sell me out and I'll lay your ship there. See how I leave with every piece of you.
LYDEN: Some people call her the new Amy Winehouse. I have to say I love these kinds of raw female voices. Years ago, Joan Armatrading, Bonnie Raitt's always had that. She's really fantastic.
Mr. THOMPSON: She won the Best New Artist Grammy a couple years ago. And there's this long running joke that being named Best New Artist by the Grammies was this gigantic kiss of death. You know, Christopher Cross and Milli Vanilli, and people who...
LYDEN: Who?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. THOMPSON: Exactly. And this particular song, it just sounds like a great hit to me.
(Soundbite of song, "Rolling in the Deep")
ADELE: (Singing) We could have had it all rolling in the deep. You had my heart and soul.
LYDEN: Now, she's another really young artist.
Mr. THOMPSON: Yeah. She is 22. And the album is called, "Twenty-One," which would signify presumably how old she was when she made it. And, you know, to be that young and be sort of as musically self-confident and self-aware as she is, I can't wait to hear what she does when she puts out a record called Twenty-Five, or Twenty-Seven, or Twenty-Nine.
LYDEN: I was checking out her website, and she's already admitting to, you know, serious life mistakes. She's (unintelligible).
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. THOMPSON: I don't know if I knew what my life mistakes were at that age.
LYDEN: Men, honey.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LYDEN: Adele, with music from her album "Twenty-One."
One last song, Stephen, and this a little a sweeter, a little gentler. This is from the singer-songwriter Sam Beam. He records under the name Iron & Wine. Again, NPR Music has had him on a lot. His new record comes out later this month, and quite a departure, I understand, from his earlier work.
Mr. THOMPSON: Yeah. Sam Beam started out making records that are very solo, acoustic, folk music where he's sort of recording these tender ballads in his bedroom. And over time, he's kind of stretched that sound out into an increasingly full sound. And this particular record, which is called "Kiss Each Other Clean," is a very, very rich-sounding kind of full band record that is -yeah, as you said, it's a clear departure.
(Soundbite of song, "Kiss Each Other Clean")
Mr. SAM BEAM (Singer, Iron & Wine): (Singing) I saw children in a river but their lips were still dry, lips were still dry. I was walking far from home and I found your face mingled in the crowd. Saw a boat-full of believers sail off talking too loud, talking too loud. I saw sunlight on the water...
LYDEN: You know, listening to this, he's an American, I hear a little John Lennon sort of in that...
Mr. THOMPSON: Yeah, in the voice. And part of what I love about him is a lot of his songs unfurl. Like they're - like he's rolling out a mural and there's just image after image after image. He's not necessarily a guy who does a lot of catchy choruses. He's a guy who's sort of letting stories unfold.
LYDEN: New music from Iron & Wine, one of the picks for 2011 from Stephen Thompson who curates our Song of the Day feature on nprmusic.org.
This has really been fun. Thank you.
Mr. THOMPSON: Thank you, Jacki. Always a pleasure.
LYDEN: I feel like we just had a glass of bracing musical champagne. And you can keep watching the NPR Music website for a big announcement about that Iron & Wine record. You're not going to give us a hint?
Mr. THOMPSON: I'm afraid I cannot.
LYDEN: Tease, tease, tease. So check it out later this week at nprmusic.org.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Guy Raz is away. I'm Jacki Lyden.
2010, all a matter of historical record now: the grief, the gizmos, the raging partisanship, the dreams - some of them came true and some didn't.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: What is in store for 2010?
Unidentified Man #2: Anti-immigration movement.
Unidentified Man #3: Low inflation.
Unidentified Woman #1: Green jobs.
Unidentified Man #4: The iPad.
Unidentified Woman #2: Justice John Paul Stevens will retire.
Unidentified Woman #3: Locally grown produce.
Unidentified Man #5: The reinvention of television, putting widgets on it for the Internet, but not having 3-D.
Unidentified Man #6: Twitter, Facebook.
Unidentified Man #7: Two-eighty a gallon...
Unidentified Man #8: More homegrown terror threats.
Unidentified Man #9: Health care reform.
Unidentified Man #10: eReaders.
Unidentified Woman #4: The Senate Democrats are going to lose their supermajority.
Unidentified Man #11: Jobs, jobs, jobs.
LYDEN: Predictions from early in 2010. Our cover story today: What lies ahead in 2011 - in politics, technology, and at the fuel pump - would you believe gas at five bucks a gallon?
That's what John Hofmeister, a former president of Shell Oil, foresees for the end of next year. He's the founder and chief executive of a nonprofit called Citizens for Affordable Energy. He says the reason prices will soar is simple: Demand is back.
Mr. JOHN HOFMEISTER (CEO, Citizens for Affordable Energy): American demand has returned to the 2007-2008 levels.
LYDEN: Hmm.
Mr. HOFMEISTER: Asian demand has increased beyond the 2007-2008 levels.
LYDEN: The jump from three bucks to five bucks, how and why does that happen?
Mr. HOFMEISTER: There's a psychology of oil pricing based on fear - fear of shortage, fear of lack of supply. You have all the countries in the world that are importing oil making long-term contracts in the trading marketplace.
And when the president and the interior secretary said in December that we were not going to pursue more offshore drilling, that sent a shock to the world trading marketplace that the U.S., once again, is not going to contribute to the crude oil supply of the world at a time when the world needs more crude oil. That's pushing prices up.
LYDEN: You're a former oil company executive. As you well know, this has been a political issue - drill, baby, drill. Many, many experts posit that we couldn't possibly drill enough offshore oil to really offset this.
Mr. HOFMEISTER: And I'm not proposing that we drill 20 million barrels a day. I'm proposing that we produce 10 million barrels a day, three million more than today, equal to what we used to produce 35 years ago. The oil is there. There's plenty of it if we would give ourselves permission as a people to go make it happen.
LYDEN: I feel a bit like Scrooge. Is this a scenario that will be or is this a scenario that could be? Is this - is there any better-case scenario?
Mr. HOFMEISTER: Well, I think there are some people convinced that we're past oil, that we should leave it in the ground, move on to alternatives. That's fine to say. But in the practical reality of everyday life in a country that has no mass transit system that enables people to travel without personal transportation, in any measure, then...
LYDEN: You're talking about us.
Mr. HOFMEISTER: I'm talking about the United States of America, yes - then we really have no choice with the 250 million cars on the road today but to put gasoline or diesel into those cars, depending on the engine. And we can talk about new ideas, talk about alternatives, but we live in today's reality, not tomorrow's future.
LYDEN: That's John Hofmeister, former president of Shell Oil Company. He also wrote a book, "Why We Hate the Oil Companies: Straight Talk From an Energy Insider."
John Hofmeister, thank you very much for coming in.
Mr. HOFMEISTER: Thank you, Jacki.
LYDEN: Now, if gas actually goes sky-high, it could have a profound impact on the political world. Almost as profound, in fact, as the impact the Tea Party had this past year.
Reid Wilson writes about politics for the Hotline at the National Journal. He's fascinated by what role the newly elected Tea Partiers might take in the Republican Party.
Mr. REID WILSON (Editor-in-Chief, National Journal Hotline): Well, I think we're going to see an immediate role with the Tea Party movement and sort of a highlighting of the schisms between the establishment Republican side and this sort of new populist movement.
One of the very first actions that the new Congress is going to have to take is debating a new budget for the rest of the year. Then about a month later, we're going to see a debate over the raising the debt ceiling. This is something that it's really not an option - people have to vote yes. If they don't, the government defaults on loans and the economy goes back in the tank.
However, with these Tea Party members now in Congress, they came to Washington to cut spending. One of the first things their leadership is going to ask them to do is to vote to allow the government to spend more money. That's not going to be something that's very popular.
So I think you're going to see a lot of these Tea Party members really sort of understanding the ways of Washington very quickly, getting their feet in the fire and having to realize, yeah, we have to vote to raise the debt ceiling...
LYDEN: Yeah.
Mr. HOFMEISTER: ...even though we've promised to cut spending.
LYDEN: So the political landscape becomes more complex. And speaking of that, it's astonishing to think 2011 is really the primary staging year for the election of 2012, the presidential election.
Mr. WILSON: That's right.
LYDEN: So, again, on the Republican side...
Mr. WILSON: Again, on the Republican side.
LYDEN: ...who you see as the pro-business, pro-populist candidate? Are the obvious names Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin?
Mr. WILSON: Well, and Mitt Romney really fits in on the sort of more managerial, more business, more establishment side. You've got a number of other governors who are considering running, who would also fit that mold.
Haley Barbour from Mississippi, Mitch Daniels from Indiana, possibly even Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, although he sort of straddles the managerial and more populist side, and then, of course, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, even Newt Gingrich, big names on the populist side who are going to be able to tap into that Tea Party excitement that was so prevalent in 2010.
LYDEN: We know there's going to be a lot of tumult politically amongst the Republicans. Only one candidate can emerge as the winner of the primary. What about the Democrats? Might there be any other serious candidate for president in 2012?
Mr. WILSON: I really don't think so. I mean, the notion that anybody would challenge a sitting president is pretty much gone. Nobody has seriously challenged a sitting president since, you know, since Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter in 1980.
But, you know, President Obama has to reach out. I mean, he's got to rebuild an electoral coalition. And his coalition in 2008 was a - an amalgamation of both liberal Democrats and centrist, even liberal Republicans. He put together coalitions that were able to win states like Indiana, North Carolina, Virginia, you know, states that Democrats don't traditionally win. That requires this sort of broad base of support.
President Obama's now going to have to sort of rejigger his entire strategy because he has alienated a number of those portions of the electorate.
LYDEN: Anybody you're going to be looking at to see, you know, who functions best? That's part of the fun of this. Any political stars maybe amongst the new Republican governors?
Mr. WILSON: Well, the new Republican governors, there are plenty. And really, Republican governors are the people who have, in the past, been able to sort of bring a new policy frontier for the Republican Party. That's what they did in 1994 with names like John Engler from Michigan, Tommy Thompson from Wisconsin. There were a number of new governors who really sort of reinvigorated the party.
This year, you got to take a look at somebody like Scott Walker from Wisconsin, Tom Corbett, the new governor-elect of Pennsylvania, Nikki Haley in South Carolina. There are a number of those sort of rising stars who are really going to bring everything to the forefront and try some new things in a different way. And the states can be incubators for ideas at the federal level.
Let's not forget that welfare reform came out of a program that Tommy Thompson tried in Wisconsin. So some of the things that these new governors are going to try now, we may be talking about them in a couple of years on the national level.
LYDEN: Reid Wilson is the editor-in-chief of National Journal's Hotline, thanks again.
Mr. WILSON: Thank you.
LYDEN: In the tech world, 2010 was the year social media exploded. Facebook, for instance, topped half a billion members. But tech writer Clive Thompson sees a reckoning ahead.
Mr. CLIVE THOMPSON (Tech Writer): I think we're going to see a kind of a tipping point in 2011 because a lot of people are becoming uncomfortable with how much they're putting out there. And this is the year we're going to begin to see them scale back a little bit.
LYDEN: And you're basing that on what?
Mr. THOMPSON: Well, it's two things. One is that it's what I see happening around me in a lot of people that use it. And also, it reminds me of what we did with the mobile phone. Think about how the mobile phone became mainstream. When it first came along, everyone got overexcited, used it way too much. They were answering the phone at the dinner table, in church, you know, completely inappropriate places. And it took about five years for people to figure out, no, I don't have to answer the phone when it rings.
And I think that same social consensus is going to start to build with social networking, starting this year.
LYDEN: I am fascinated by something - you've written about a program named Broadcastr.
Mr. THOMPSON: Broadcastr, yes. This just got released - it's very interesting. It takes this idea of sort of geographically placed data, like Foursquare, a new step. What you do is you can record a little bit of audio to leave embedded in space so that, you know, when someone goes by there, they'll see a note and think, hey, someone left a message and you can listen to it.
And so, people will do it for playful reasons. You know, they'll leave little messages hidden for each other. Some people will use it to review restaurants. You go inside the restaurant: that was horrible. You know, that was wonderful.
So you're beginning to see this emergence of like really playful, silly, some dumb ways to implant information in geography.
LYDEN: I hope it stays playful. I mean, it sounds fascinating. Here's something. Amazon has sold over five million Kindle since the release of its Kindle 3. What about eBooks in 2011?
Mr. THOMPSON: I think this is going to be a very explosive year for eBooks, because the price of the eBook readers has dropped dramatically. I mean, they've cut by more than half in the last couple of years. I think by the end of this year, you'll see them getting blown out in clearance for like 50 bucks. And that completely changes the dynamic of who's going to buy that device. When it becomes almost as disposable as a pocket calculator, you'll see the vast majority of people switching over to eBooks.
LYDEN: Clive, what's in the offing? What'll get developed?
Mr. THOMPSON: Well, you know, in 2010, Microsoft released this cool little thing called the Connect, which is a little device that sits on top of your Xbox. And it looks at your body, and so you can use just waving your arms and moving around to control video games. And that's obviously a lot of fun. People have done, you know, soccer games, dancing games.
But a bunch of hackers immediately set about reverse-engineering it so they could use it to control their computers, and they succeeded. So they can sit there in the middle of the room and, you know, wave their arms to call up their email, or if their hands are messy while they're cooking they could control recipes, you know, by waving their hands and their body.
And over the next couple of years, we'll see the emergence of what you could call gestural interfaces. So the ability to control everything from your audio player to your computer just by waving your hands around almost like Harry Potter-like incantations.
LYDEN: Wow. When I walk in the house and say dust and it does it, I'll think that'll be just fantastic.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. THOMPSON: Exactly.
LYDEN: That's Clive Thompson, contributing writer for The New York Times magazine, also Wired. Clive, thanks.
MR. THOMPSON: Good to be here.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
And these were three of the people we lost in the last days of 2010.
Mr. DENIS DUTTON (Philosopher): Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? No. It's deep in our minds. It's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and rich emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors.
Ambassador DAVID WILKINS: Today in Washington, we're lacking the Milliken mindset. Well, here in South Carolina, our party is benefiting from the Milliken match.
Dr. BILLY TAYLOR (Jazz Pianist and Educator): Jazz is distinctly American music. It takes the most important elements in our culture and expresses them in musical terms.
LYDEN: James Fallows of The Atlantic is here to talk about these three who all died this past week.
Welcome and happy New Year, Jim.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, The Atlantic): Thank you. Same to you, Jacki.
LYDEN: So the first voice we heard was that of Denis Dutton, the American philosopher and skeptic who died on Tuesday at the age of just 66.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. He died in New Zealand where he lived for the last 25 years as a philosophy professor at the University of Canterbury. What was so striking about Denis Dutton, who I knew somewhat over the years, was the range of his interests and accomplishments.
He was, of course, a philosopher. The quote you heard was from his argument that our appreciation of beauty is not something that's socially shaped but is part of our evolutionary heritage. He sponsored the famous Bad Writing Contest, which got so popular he finally had to call if off. And he created a very, very influential website called Arts & Letters Daily, which was sort of the first high-end internet magazine that's worth looking at even now.
LYDEN: Jim, the second man in your list here is Roger Milliken. And he was much older - 95 - when he died on Thursday.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. He died in South Carolina where he lived - he spent most of his life. He was also, like Denis Dutton, a man of amazingly varied part. He's probably best known as an industrialist. His Milliken Industries he led for a very long time, and his family still controls it. He was very, very active in conservative politics.
He was a very influential early backer of Barry Goldwater. He convinced Strom Thurmond to become a Republican in South Carolina, and in a way, sort of built a Republican Party in South Carolina and the south more generally. At the same time, he was a scholar and an intellectual and an environmentalist and a person who was very, very committed to research at his company and to American-based manufacturing and represented a kind of high-end intellectually based conservatism that's not quite as permanent on the American scene now.
LYDEN: Lastly, Jim, a few words of remembrance about a man who was much loved here at NPR, Dr. Billy Taylor, the jazz pianist and educator who had a program for many, many years, "Jazz Alive."
Mr. FALLOWS: He was a great performer and a great teacher. And one of the things I most appreciated about him was a series of clips I saw recently from a show he did in 1950. It's called "The Subject is Jazz," bringing the whole culture of music, the history of music and the technique to a wider audience. And that is one of his great achievements for which he'll be appreciated and missed.
LYDEN: And a link with so many great performers. It's nice to think about these three. James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. And you can read his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.
Jim, thanks so much. I'm glad to start the New Year with you.
Mr. FALLOWS: Thank you, Jacki.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
Beneath Switzerland and France, the world's most massive physics machine is sending subatomic particles smashing into each other at velocities nearing the speed of light. Physicists working with the 17-mile-long Large Hadron Collider hope it will help solve some of the universe's mysteries.
First, though, researchers must clear two hurdles: how to handle all the data the Large Hadron Collider generates and how to get non-scientists to care.
NPR's Andrew Prince reports on the way one scientist is trying to do both those things through sound.
ANDREW PRINCE: Lily Asquith is a physicist who until recently worked at the Large Hadron Collider. She lives and breathes subatomic particles.
Dr. LILY ASQUITH (Physicist): I suppose we spend a lot of time thinking about these particles, so you do tend to personify things that you think about a lot.
PRINCE: She gives them personalities, colors and sounds.
Dr. ASQUITH: I think electrons, perhaps, sound like a glockenspiel to me.
(Soundbite of glockenspiel)
PRINCE: Lily and other researchers at the LHC were searching for the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle that scientists say gives everything in the universe mass. In the process of this search, the LHC generates just a massive amount of information, more than 40 million pieces of data every second. And that's just from one of the four main detectors in the deep underground complex.
So Lily was trying to figure out a new way to understand and sort through all this data. The LHC currently produces images as an output from the data, beautiful, colorful images, sprays of particles in different directions.
Dr. ASQUITH: And it's quite easy to step from there, really, to consider that there could be some kind of sound associated with these things.
(Soundbite of heart monitor)
PRINCE: She thought about a heart monitor in a hospital like this one, how it turns the electrical data from your heart into sound.
Dr. ASQUITH: You don't have to watch the monitor because you can hear it without making any effort. Just a steady beep. You can quite easily detect if it starts going quicker or if it stops even for a second.
PRINCE: And she wondered what it would be like to use music composition software to turn data from the collider into sound.
(Soundbite of noise)
PRINCE: She fed in a sample of the LHC data, just three columns of numbers.
Dr. ASQUITH: So we'll map, for example, the first column of numbers, which may be a distance, to time. And we may map the second column of numbers to pitch, and the third, perhaps, to volume.
PRINCE: What she got isn't quite music, something more out of this world.
(Soundbite of noise)
PRINCE: So what does it all mean? Well, right now, Lily Asquith says the sounds don't tell scientists very much. But she hopes that in the future, it could help them understand the data in new ways. She says that in certain situations, it's much easier to use your ears than your eyes, particularly with something that's changing over time.
But the project is doing something else: making what's going on at the collider accessible and interesting to people without Ph.D.s. That includes many of Lily's friends who are musicians.
They're really interested in and even fascinated by what's going on there. But she says they get a frightened look on their face when she brings up the hard science.
Dr. ASQUITH: I just think that's unnecessary that it frightens people. It should be something that everyone should enjoy.
PRINCE: Andrew Prince, NPR News, Washington.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden.
As people walk along the busy streets of New York City, urban explorer Steve Duncan goes below, far below, through the city's tunnels, subways, sewers. It's a deep, dark look at New York's working history many of us will never see. But down there...
(Soundbite of siren)
LYDEN: ...each expedition comes with its own dangers.
Mr. STEVE DUNCAN: I don't want to make it sound too dramatic because it's easy enough to hurt yourself walking across the street in New York.
(Soundbites of beeping, gas whooshing, cigarette lighter, explosion)
Mr. DUNCAN: Definitely, there's some different dangers underground. One of the most obvious is the possibility of bad atmosphere, carbon monoxide buildup, hydrogen sulfide, also known as sewer gas. If you have an underground vault and a gas line breaks nearby, that might end up flooding it with flammable gas. Perhaps just a tiny spark from within a headlamp or maybe lighting a cigarette can set that off, and that's terrible.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LYDEN: Not to mention the manholes he uses are in the middle of the street.
Mr. DUNCAN: Cars can come over those at any point. Subway systems, where you have 750 volts running along a live, exposed line. When you also have puddles, that can be a terrible thing, exposed metal, random holes. On the subway, when trains are routed in different directions, the tracks switch a little bit, and it's possible to get your foot stuck in those if you're there at the wrong time.
These are environments that, like the wildest places on earth, you know, do have a lot of danger.
LYDEN: Of course, why Steve Duncan explores these spaces is another question entirely. Now, think about it. If you could follow Alice down that rabbit hole or Jules Verne to the center of the Earth, wouldn't you do it? We did.
Steve Duncan took us on a week-long trek through 25 miles of New York underground, each adventure going deeper from the one before.
Our first leg, it's the middle of the night, a freezing, snowy street corner in the Bronx with a tall Norwegian in his underwear.
Mr. ERLING KAGGE: All Norwegians believe in this kind of underwear.
LYDEN: He's changing his pants. His underwear look a little like fishnet stockings.
Mr. KAGGE: It's like putting on the central heating.
LYDEN: Nordic explorer Erling Kagge is the reason for this journey. He and Steve met a year ago. Erling's ruggedly handsome, in his late 40s. He's climbed the major mountain peaks. He was the first man to walk alone to the North Pole. He shot and killed a charging polar bear with a handgun. Now, he wants to explore New York's subconscious.
Mr. KAGGE: And I'm always kind of asking myself, you know, why can't I just remain sitting in the chair instead of going out and going on a new expedition.
LYDEN: So you do ask yourself that.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LYDEN: And why do you think it is?
Mr. KAGGE: But I'm not always waiting for the answer.
LYDEN: Erling does wait, though, for Steve to arrive so that the journey can begin.
Mr. DUNCAN: Hello.
LYDEN: Hi.
With his shock of white blond hair, the 32-year-old looks like a human sparkler. Steve brought along a videographer and reporter from The New York Times. We all set off.
Our entrance to the sewer is a drainage culvert in the middle of a park, mmm, somewhere in the Bronx.
Mr. DUNCAN: We're going in at a place where what used to be an aboveground river was channeled into a culvert and then fed into one of the Bronx's older sewers.
LYDEN: But it's been snowing a lot. And when we get there, it looks a little deep.
Mr. DUNCAN: What do you think? You want to try it?
LYDEN: What's happening right now is Steve lowered himself over the side, and he's trying to test how deep this water is. Looks pretty dangerous to me, actually.
Mr. KAGGE: I'm surprised by how much water it is.
LYDEN: And this man has summitted Everest. Given the danger, we make the call to stick with Steve's topside crew tonight, a friend named Will Hunt. The plan is for Steve and Erling to wade a mile through the sewer to an exit manhole. They disappear into the tunnel, and then we wait.
Mr. WILL HUNT: This is topside. Are you guys okay?
LYDEN: Have you ever been waiting for a friend who's late?
Mr. HUNT: Let us know how things are.
LYDEN: That's Will on a walkie-talkie. Do you know how you ask yourself: At what point do I stop waiting?
(Soundbite of ringing)
LYDEN: We wait for an hour, nothing from the guys. Two hours...
Mr. HUNT: Ray(ph), it's not still going.
LYDEN: ...nothing.
Mr. HUNT: ...which is making me a little disconcerted about the fact we haven't seen them yet.
LYDEN: They were only walking a mile. By 5 a.m., it's been over three freezing hours, when finally...
Mr. HUNT: Steve, this is Will, over.
LYDEN: Will gets through.
(Soundbite of beeping)
Mr. DUNCAN: Oh, great. We're here.
Mr. HUNT: All right. Come on up.
Mr. DUNCAN: Hey.
LYDEN: Out they climb; filthy, tired. What happened down there?
Mr. DUNCAN: Terrible things. I can't talk about it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. KAGGE: I wouldn't say jolly good, clean fun.
LYDEN: They were snapping photos, coping with leaky waders. And Steve says sometimes time just moves differently underground.
Mr. DUNCAN: It always takes so much longer underground than I expect. And then when I look at - when I map it out and I...
LYDEN: All right, let's come up for a breath. Why are they doing this? Back in 1997, Steve was an engineering undergrad at Columbia University.
Mr. DUNCAN: I was woefully unprepared for a final in a math class and realized I had to do some of the homework on a computer program that was only available in the math building. And it was late at night. So I asked a friend, who I knew ran around the tunnels at Columbia, if there's any way to get in there. And he said: Sure, I can show you.
So he took me to an entrance to the steam tunnel system and said, basically, go that way and make a few turns, you'll be right there.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. DUNCAN: And he took off. I hadn't expected that part. But I felt like I couldn't back down then. And so I went in, and just the whole experience of being alone in the dark, in this built environment, I felt like I was a million miles away from any other human. And of course, I was only 10 feet away from the busy sidewalks. They were just straight overhead.
LYDEN: And later that morning, it's to Columbia that Steve returns. For this leg, we're going below with him through the doors of a small brick building on campus.
We're dirty. We have huge backpacks. It's almost scary how easy this is, down some stairs, past two employees stocking a vending machine. We reached an unmarked door at the bottom. After a long corridor of clanking, boiling steam pipes, we shimmy up a ladder and into a crawlspace.
Mr. DUNCAN: So right now, we're underneath a building called Buell Hall. It's also the French House. Before this was Columbia University, it was the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. So you can see the, you know, where we're underneath it, it's these wood rafters supported on newer steel beams. So when I was freezing a little bit earlier, I thought like the warmest place I could think of underground and came up with this.
LYDEN: We've been up all night, and the dirt floor feels comfy. Everybody sleeps like a stone, except for me. I imagine that I can hear students speaking French from above and rest my cold toes on a heating pipe. Six hours later, the group starts to wake.
Mr. KAGGE: How I slept? Yeah, great. That was a long time, I think.
LYDEN: How did it compare to the Arctic?
Mr. KAGGE: It's definitely warmer here in the central heating of Columbia University.
(Soundbite of phone ringing)
LYDEN: No sooner is Steve awake than friends are already calling about the coming night's adventure.
Mr. DUNCAN: Get in. I can't talk now. I'm about to escape from the underground.
LYDEN: We brace ourselves with a few cough drops, a swig of bourbon, breakfast of champions. We're coming up through the bowels of Columbia. The clanking heating pipes really feel like the center of the Earth. We find a mysterious door marked Philosophy. Erling pauses...
Mr. KAGGE: I like to open doors most people do not open.
LYDEN: ...and pushes through. Good heavens, we've stumbled into a faculty Christmas party, and our dashing leader suddenly feels shy.
Mr. DUNCAN: I'm ashamed to admit it, Erling, but I'm a coward. Okay, go. Bring me back a drink and a girl. Oh, come on. Come on. Come on.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LYDEN: But we leave empty-handed and head out into the night.
Tell us about what you learn - what you're observing from your eyes in the lead of a small group or alone, what you're looking for.
Mr. DUNCAN: Well, part of what I'm looking for is just, you know, I know a little bit about what's underground, but it's still, it's this giant unexplored territory in a lot of ways. And so I'm really interested in what I'm actually going to find.
For example, we went in that old sewer in the Bronx from the 1890s, and just that gorgeous arched brick, that was really what I was looking for there. But yeah, I wish I could tell you that I had everything completely mapped out before I go underground. That's very, very rarely the case.
LYDEN: You've got a couple of maps?
Mr. DUNCAN: I do have a couple maps, yeah. Interestingly, though, New York -pretty much nobody has a complete map of the underground. It's like a mess of spaghetti down there sometimes. So I have historical data, I have archival maps. Sometimes I have maps of current systems. But sometimes, it isn't quite what I expect.
LYDEN: You can say that again. Our third night out with Steve, we're in a subway station in Lower Manhattan getting ready to explore what we've been told is an abandoned portion of tracking. Steve is giving us a little safety prep.
Mr. DUNCAN: And the big thing here is not to get killed. So don't touch the third rail. And if a train's coming, get out of the way. That might mean - in the worst situation I can imagine, that might mean standing in between those two third rails and in between two pillars so the trains are coming on each side of you. You won't get killed. You will get seen, but that's much better than dying.
LYDEN: A final train leaves, Steve jumps down, and we follow. We move like a column of special-ops, in silence, hopping over the deadly third rail with Steve in the lead. The tunnel is dim. Only the lights glow soft and blue.
(Soundbite of train)
LYDEN: The train we hear is on another track, but it's still unsettling. As we clamor onto an abandoned platform, Steve freezes.
Mr. DUNCAN: I could have sworn I saw a guy over there. Did anybody else see that?
LYDEN: Suddenly, Steve is running, and there's nothing we can do but run after him. We've been spotted, and now we're hopping back across live tracks. Up on the platform, 30 stunned spectators look on as we hoist ourselves up. Our microphones barely make it, and we dash out of the station.
I want to talk a little bit about two things that happen to start with the same letter: mortality and morality. Let's talk about this first. I mean, it is against the law, I presume, to explore these behind-barrier spaces, and you're smiling.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. DUNCAN: Yeah. Legality and morality, I think, are really different issues. And so I try hard never to do anything that's immoral, that I consider bad.
Some of what I do involves trespassing. I think that we have, in the U.S., a kind of legal tradition that really stresses sacrosanct qualities of private property. If it's not yours, you shouldn't be there, whereas a lot of these places are really public structures. They're part of what make the city function.
So if we were to switch our mentality and say, well, you can be there, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody, I think that would open up a lot of parts of the city that people would love to see.
LYDEN: Yeah.
Mr. DUNCAN: It really is a different world. Part of that's just being in the dark. I mean, being in the dark has an incredible impact. And, you know, a lot of places, I could die down there and literally not be discovered for years or maybe even ever. That feeling just to me kind of wakes up something and heightens my senses in a little way, where if it's a dark environment, whatever's picked out in my headlight beam has an intensity that I don't get when everything's brightly lit.
LYDEN: Our final night with Steve is our deepest. We're walking into an Amtrak tunnel as wide as an airplane hangar underneath Riverside Drive on Manhattan's Upper West Side.
It's pitch black. Only our headlamps guide our way. The walls are covered in graffiti and murals. People live down here. They're known as the mole people. Here's how you find them.
Mr. DUNCAN: Hey, John, are you around? It's Steve Duncan.
LYDEN: But there's one person in particular we're here to visit tonight, a woman called Brooklyn who says she's lived in this tunnel since 1982. On their first adventure a few months back, Steve introduced Erling to Brooklyn. This week, it's our turn.
Okay, we're now - everybody is crawling through a very small space.
BROOKLYN: Hi, guys.
Mr. KAGGE: Hi. How are you doing?
BROOKLYN: Welcome.
Mr. KAGGE: Thank you.
BROOKLYN: Welcome to my igloo.
LYDEN: From the darkness comes Brooklyn, a vigorous woman with a bandana and heavy coat. Erling's brought her a gift.
BROOKLYN: Oh, you brought me a birthday cake. Oh, God. You remembered.
Mr. KAGGE: Of course.
BROOKLYN: That's nice.
LYDEN: Brooklyn is 50 this week, but her cake is a little squished from the tight passages.
BROOKLYN: It's okay. It's okay. It's strawberry shortcake?
Mr. KAGGE: Hmm?
BROOKLYN: What kind is it? Strawberry?
Mr. KAGGE: Yes, it's cream cake.
BROOKLYN: Oh, yeah. That looks good. That looks yummy. Don't even worry. Don't worry. I'm loving it.
LYDEN: She tells us her story, sitting amid heaps of recyclable trash: bottles, bicycle parts, grimy rugs. Once, she claims, she was in the Marine Corps. She became homeless after her parents died. She says she found this concrete cavern by following a cat down a grotto in Riverside Park. When she arrived, she found dozens more.
BROOKLYN: Basically, it was 49 cats. I counted them. And I started coming to feed them every day. Immediately, I fell in love with them, okay? So I was like, oh, man, they're homeless just like me. They starving.
LYDEN: Erling wants to know more about Brooklyn's life down here. He asks: What makes her happy?
BROOKLYN: Well, you guys right now, the company. It gets lonely.
Mr. KAGGE: Because - do you think you're more happy than most people?
BROOKLYN: Yeah.
Mr. KAGGE: What do you think people aboveground do wrong in life?
BROOKLYN: Because, you know, you don't appreciate what you've got. You know what I'm saying? I don't know why people are miserable. They got everything that I don't have, and I'm more happier than them.
LYDEN: As we say goodnight, Brooklyn is grateful for the food and company.
BROOKLYN: All right, guys. We one big family.
LYDEN: And a little whiskey.
BROOKLYN: (Singing) We are family. Eh, eh, eh, eh, I, I've got all my sisters and brothers with me, ah, ah. Sing Brooklyn, ah.
LYDEN: Thinking about all this, Steve Duncan has been exploring tunnels, even scaling bridges in New York, looking death in the face in more ways than one. Seven years ago, he survived a rare form of bone cancer in his hip. Doctors said he wouldn't walk again.
Mr. DUNCAN: You know, at first, I felt really sorry for myself. But the thing that I had most often occurs with kids, and so I was on a pediatric cancer ward for a couple of weeks. And nothing like being on a pediatric cancer ward to help you realize how relatively lucky you have it.
I do have some leftover problems. I can't really run like I used to. And after a while of walking around, my hip starts to really hurt from the osteoarthritis. So I won't be able to do this forever. I won't be able to have the same adventures. But again, it just really made me think, you know, I'd better enjoy life while I can because I won't always have two functioning legs like I do right now.
LYDEN: So how long do you think before your next descent? I mean, you just went through - because even this was unusual for you. This was like day after day after day.
Mr. DUNCAN: Yeah.
LYDEN: That was kind of the first time you've done something like that, right?
Mr. DUNCAN: Yeah, absolutely. Most of the time, it's maybe one trip a week. It's back to grad school after this for me. So hopefully, this will keep me sane for the next couple months of sitting at the library.
LYDEN: Do you want to teach someday?
Mr. DUNCAN: What I'd like to do is what Indiana Jones did where he taught half the time and ran off on adventures the other half of the time.
(Soundbite of music)
LYDEN: Steve Duncan. Our underground adventure was produced by Brent Baughman. A slideshow of photos from our journey is at npr.org.
(Soundbite of music)
LYDEN: And for Sunday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Jacki Lyden. Remember, you can hear the best of this program on our new podcast, "Weekends On All Things Considered." Subscribe or listen at npr.org/weekendatc. Guy Raz will be back in this chair next weekend. Until then, thanks for listening. Have a great week.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
Philosophy professor Michael Taber thinks we use ethical reasoning all the time in our daily lives: what we eat, what we buy, how we act toward other people. So he posed a challenge to the students in his class on altruism and egoism at St. Mary's College in Maryland: decide as a class if he should donate his own kidney to someone in need.
Michael Taber is with us now from member station WBUR in Boston.
Welcome.
Professor MICHAEL TABER (Philosophy, St. Mary's College): Good day.
LYDEN: Well, quite the question. It made me sort of grab for my side. How did you decide to put your kidney on the line for the sake of philosophy?
Prof. TABER: I was trying to come up with an exercise that would allow them to apply some of the concepts and some of the discussions that we were having in the seminar to a real issue and not just to a theoretical issue but to a real issue.
So I tasked them, as one of the assignments of the - over the course of the semester, to write me some recommendations about whether or not I should donate a kidney to a stranger.
LYDEN: And the truth is you expected them to say what?
Prof. TABER: I would have predicted that they would have recommended in favor of donation but maybe have backed off and framed their recommendation with some caveats about, well, of course, it's your decision, or we realize it's a difficult issue, so we don't expect you necessarily to take our advice.
And I had told them at the beginning of the semester that I did reserve the right to not take whatever their recommendation would be.
LYDEN: Which was?
Prof. TABER: Their recommendation was not to donate, although it wasn't because they thought it was a bad idea. It wasn't because they thought that donating was not a good thing. In fact, many of them, through the recommendation paper, it was very clear that they believed that this would be a very good thing to do, going above and beyond and all the usual sorts of ways we would talk about such charitable actions.
But they felt uneasy making that recommendation to someone they know, namely me.
LYDEN: How did you feel about your students' response? How did you assess them?
Prof. TABER: Well, when I first read the paper, I was quite impressed with the rather extensive discussion they had and the way they had carved up the issues.
In terms of assessment, the students got an A. I told them that they would all get the same grade for it. It was worth five percent of the grade, and they got full five percent for the paper.
LYDEN: So you weren't disappointed?
Prof. TABER: I was very impressed with the paper upon first reading. And then -and I actually had a bit of pause the second time reading through it, which was actually the next morning, which is where I was more struck with how it was that they were not making a recommendation. They were deliberately backing off, in some sense, what they were assigned to do. And...
LYDEN: But they saw it as responsibility, not advice.
Prof. TABER: They saw it as responsibility. I think in part that's because there is something much more personal and intimate about envisioning someone lying on an operating table and being cut open. The decision to do something as intimate and personal as giving literally a part of oneself is not simply like whether or not to donate, say, even a sizable amount of money to a good cause.
LYDEN: But you're teaching philosophy, not precisely medical ethics. And the kids said: Listen, we know that this is going to look, at first glance, like a cop out. I'm looking at their paper right here.
Prof. TABER: Right.
LYDEN: They said: None of us could handle the decision of being responsible for the choice if something went wrong. Is that a cop out?
Prof. TABER: It's - I guess it is a cop out in the sense that there's all kinds of ways that we can rationalize to ourselves not getting involved, even though, I must say, I did tell them in class the day after I read the paper. I said, look, if I were trying to decide between buying an SUV and a small hybrid, I'm sure none of you would have had any reluctance about giving me recommendations.
LYDEN: Well, let me jump in there. This is a class, altruism and egoism. Was there an element of egoism involving yourself in posing this question in the first place, whether you should donate your kidney?
Prof. TABER: That is actually one of the issues we did talk about. By the virtue of making this public, does that detract from the altruism of the action? That's an issue, and it's an issue I wanted them to address and they did address.
LYDEN: So, Michael Taber, what happens to your kidney now?
Prof. TABER: What I am going to do is still donate. I would like to wait maybe eight to 10 years until our daughters are in a more kind of stable - I hope by then - stable life situation, and I being 51 now shouldn't be too decrepit that no one would want my kidney.
LYDEN: That's Michael Taber, a philosophy professor at St. Mary's College, Maryland. He asked his students to craft an argument about whether or not he should donate his own kidney.
Michael Taber, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Prof. TABER: You're quite welcome. It was enjoyable talking to you.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
For most of us, tonight marks the end of weeks of holiday feasting. If you still have an appetite, it's not too late to defy the fates and eat your way to a lucky new year.
Our guide to foods lucky and not so lucky:
Ms. TANYA STEEL (Editor in Chief, Epicurious.com): I'm Tanya Steel, editor in chief of Epicurious.com.
LYDEN: Now, in the South, starting off the year with a dish of black-eyed peas is a good luck tradition. How this got started is a subject of debate, but Steel has a favorite story.
Ms. STEEL: During the Civil War in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the townspeople thought they'd run out of every possible morsel of food. So they were searching and searching, and they found some dried black-eyed peas, and that kind of saved the town.
(Soundbite of music)
LYDEN: In Germany, eating pork is considered lucky for the new year. The German phrase for I've been lucky is Ich habe Schwein gehabt is the same as I've had a pig.
Ms. STEEL: Pigs are kind of rooted in the ground, and they're always moving forward. So they symbolize progress. And they have a very rich fat content, which really signifies kind of prosperity.
LYDEN: On the other side of the barnyard, Hungarians avoid eating chicken or other fowl that scratch the ground for food for fear that they would also scratch away good luck. Steel raises another reason why birds might be a bad new year's choice.
Ms. STEEL: So anything winged apparently is not good luck because that good luck could fly away from your house. So you don't want to do that.
LYDEN: And Steel's family has a personal dining aversion at the beginning of the new year.
Ms. STEEL: We've never eaten lobster on New Year's because it is considered luck merely because they move backwards and could apparently lead to setbacks in the new year.
(Soundbite of music)
LYDEN: If you're looking for something lucky and something sweeter, there's a tradition that dates back to 1909, when farmers in the Spanish city of Alicante were faced with a surplus of grapes. With each of the 12 strokes of midnight on New Year's Day, revelers eat a grape, one for each month of the new year.
Ms. STEEL: The theory is that, say, one goes down badly or the fifth one is sour or the sixth one is going rotten, then that particular month is not going to be good.
LYDEN: Round or ring-shaped cakes and other baked goods may not lead to good health, but in Mexico or Greece, coin-like shapes are thought to ensure a prosperous year. Cakes there are baked with coins, and other surprises are hidden inside. The lucky finders get a year of good fortune as long as their dental work holds up. And then there's Steel's favorite lucky food for the new year.
Ms. STEEL: Pecan shortbread cookies, which are just a staple in our household. They are so delicious, and they bring good luck because we love to eat them. So the only thing that we have to worry about post-New Year's is on the foods that we've eaten to bring us luck in fact brought us extra pounds.
LYDEN: A perennial challenge just about everybody faces after the holidays. This year, though, maybe luck will be on our side.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
Now while the Large Hadron Collider is smashing atoms and blowing scientific minds, research shows that we, as a species, are actually seeing our brains get smaller.
Kathleen McAuliffe writes about human evolution for Discover Magazine, and she stumbled upon this story of the amazing shrinking brain while researching a different story.
Ms. KATHLEEN McAULIFFE (Writer, Discover Magazine): Well, I was interviewing the anthropologist John Hawkes about his genetic research related to human evolution when he added, just sort of as a casual aside, that the human brain is shrinking. And I said, what? I thought it was getting bigger.
And he said, no, that was true for two million years of our evolution. But then about 20,000 years ago, there was a reversal. And our brain has been getting smaller and smaller ever since.
LYDEN: Wow. That is really shocking. How much smaller are our brains from those of our ancestors?
Ms. McAULIFFE: Well, they - humans who had the largest brains are the Cro-Magnons, who lived 20 to 30,000 years ago in Europe. The missing chunk of brain matter is roughly equivalent to a tennis ball in size. That's about a 10 percent shrinkage.
LYDEN: What are the implications of this as a species? Are we dumbing down?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. McAULIFFE: Well, the funny thing is that even the experts don't know for sure.
LYDEN: Now in your article for Discover, you focused on a researcher named Geary. How did he see this?
Ms. McAULIFFE: David Geary, he is a cognitive scientist at the University of Missouri. And he subscribes to the idiocracy theory. Did you ever see the film "Idiocracy?"
(Soundbite of movie, "Idiocracy")
Unidentified Man: As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point.
Ms. McAULIFFE: A perfectly average guy called Joe.
(Soundbite of movie, "Idiocracy")
Mr. MICHAEL McCAFFERTY (Actor): (as Officer Collins) Gentlemen, meet Joe Bauers, our first subject for the human hibernation experiment.
Ms. McAULIFFE: And when he wakes up 500 years later, he finds himself on a dumbed-down planet where he's easily the smartest person around.
(Soundbite of movie, "Idiocracy")
Mr. TERRY CREWS (Actor): (as President Camacho) So you're smart, huh?
Mr. LUKE WILSON (Actor): (as Joe Bauers) No, no.
Mr. CREWS: (as President Camacho) I thought your head would be bigger.
Ms. McAULIFFE: And Geary thinks something a little bit like this happened to us. Just around the time when we see brain size decreasing, the human population is going from very sparse to dense in different parts of the world, and it's just at that point when you're seeing the beginnings of society springing up. And there's more division of labor, more complex interactions between people. Trade springs up between groups. And so you don't have to be as smart to stay alive.
LYDEN: Kathleen McAuliffe, her article in Discover Magazine is on the shrinkage of the human brain.
Thank you.
Ms. McAULIFFE: Well, thank you.
LYDEN: So there's a scientist who thinks he can explain why the human brain has been shrinking and why that might not even be a bad thing. His name is Brian Hare, and he's an anthropologist at Duke University, who studies the great apes.
He says that as animal species become domesticated, their brains generally get smaller.
Professor BRIAN HARE (Institute for Brain Sciences, Duke University; Anthropologist): So whether you're talking about a turkey, a dog or a cat, you have not just less aggression and more playful behavior, but you have an animal that, relative to the wild type, it has a smaller brain.
LYDEN: Well, what about cooperation, which all really human endeavor is going to depend on, more or less? You've looked at apes and chimps, as we said. You found that a smaller brain can actually mean a better ability to work together. Why is that?
Prof. HARE: Well, if we look at our two closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, bonobos being the tolerant and less aggressive of the two ape species, what's interesting is even though bonobos have a smaller brain - and some people might argue because of that they should be less intelligent - when we give them a problem where they have to work together, it ends up that bonobos can solve the problem in contexts where chimpazees can't.
Let's say there's food that's out of reach, and you have to pull it within reach, and you have to work together, two individuals, to pull it within reach, well, bonobos, even if the food is quite sparse and it's not easy to share, they can solve the problem, whereas chimpanzees, in that same context where there's not much food and it's not easy to share, well, they just refuse to work together. And they can't solve the problem, even though they know how.
So again, who's smarter?
LYDEN: It just says that a lot of intelligence is relative.
Prof. HARE: That's right. The smaller brain in modern humans may be evidence that we can cooperate, and we have tolerance that you may not have seen in archaic Homo or in Neanderthals.
LYDEN: You've given hope to so many.
(Soundbite of laughter)
LYDEN: That's Brian Hare, an anthropologist who studies domestication of great apes at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.
Thank you.
Prof. HARE: Thank you very much.
JACKI LYDEN, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Guy Raz is away. I'm Jacki Lyden.
It's a simple question: If three plus X equals six, what's the value of X? Not exactly advanced calculus, but basic questions like this stump many of this country's high school graduates; so many that nearly one in four potential military recruits can't pass the academic enlistment test.
For recruiters, it's not just an academic challenge. Seventy-five percent of all 17- to 24-year-olds don't meet the basic minimum standards required for military service. They're either physically unfit, have a criminal record or didn't graduate from high school.
Our cover story today: military recruiting. Are we passing the test?
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: There's strong, and then there's Army strong.
Unidentified Man #2: The U.S. Air Force. We have the power to go where no one else can.
Unidentified Man #3: America's Navy, a global force for good.
Unidentified Man #4: The few, the proud, the Marines.
LYDEN: Partly because of the tough economic times, recruiters are still meeting their enlistment goals. Some high school graduates see the military as their only viable career option.
But a new report by the nonprofit, the Education Trust, shows that far too few high school graduates have the basic math, reading or problem-solving skills necessary to pass the test, which is officially called the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery exam, or, in military jargon, the ASVAB.
Amy Wilkins is vice president of the Education Trust, and she's responsible for its latest report called Shut Out of the Military.
Ms. AMY WILKINS (Vice President, Education Trust): There's been a lot of conversation in this country about whether or not students are graduating ready for college and ready for career, but a lot of the conversation about career readiness has been in the civilian workforce.
So we asked the question, are they ready for a career in the military? And what we found is that far too few of our students graduate from high school ready to serve our country.
LYDEN: And we're talking about basic problem solving here.
Ms. WILKINS: Yeah. The ASVAB, the term that the Army uses for the test, is the world's most frequently used aptitude test, and it is a battery of several tests, and the Army gives it to potential recruits to ensure that they have the skills and knowledge to meet the needs of the Army.
Now one of the important things about this is because the - many of the jobs in the Army, the workforce of the Army, so closely mirrors the civilian workforce -if kids aren't ready for jobs in the Army, they also aren't ready for jobs in the civilian workforce.
LYDEN: So this might be a loaded question, Amy Wilkins, but why do you think this is happening?
Ms. WILKINS: I think our high schools aren't doing what they need to do to prepare our kids. We know from the colleges around the country that too many kids who enter college need remediation. We hear time and again from civilian employers that our kids don't have the skills to meet the demands of their potential employers, and now we're hearing from the military that our kids aren't skilled enough to serve the country well. I think we have a big problem with American high schools.
LYDEN: How well do students need to score out of a hundred points?
Ms. WILKINS: To get into the Army, just to enter the Army, you need to get a score of 31. But then scores between 31 and 99, the top score, where you score in that range tells the Army or sort of slots you in to different opportunities in the Army. The higher the score, the more opportunities you have. The lower the score, the fewer opportunities you have.
So we all hear about things like the ability to get scholarships in the Army, the ability to get really sophisticated training. If you score very low, those opportunities aren't available to you.
LYDEN: And you found that this also falls along minority lines in terms of ranking.
Ms. WILKINS: Yes. African-American kids and Latino kids are far less likely than white kids to earn the types of scores that'll make them eligible for scholarships and sophisticated training opportunities.
LYDEN: And what's the particular problem, math?
Ms. WILKINS: Math, problem solving, science knowledge. It's sort of across the board.
LYDEN: Yet the Defense Department is saying, hey, we're on target for recruitment. We're meeting our goals. How do these low scores affect that?
Ms. WILKINS: Well, I think, and I think what the folks over at the Department of Defense say, is that the bad economy is helping somewhat. And so as we think about the economy recovering, I think that may hurt our recruitment.
You also see - again, we only looked at, you know, people pretty fresh out of high school. What the Army's also seeing is they're seeing older people come back, so some of this, you know, people changing careers, people who lost a job coming back and looking to join the Army.
So we were looking at young people. Right now, they don't need as many young people because they have older people coming back.
LYDEN: That's Amy Wilkins, vice president of the Education Trust. She helped orchestrate the nonprofit research organization's most recent study, Shut Out of the Military.
Amy Wilkins, thank you.
Ms. WILKINS: Thank you.
LYDEN: Now test scores aren't the only thing keeping potential recruits out of the military. Earlier this year, we learned that nine million Americans of prime recruiting age are too heavy to enlist. Tack on criminal records, and the pool for military recruitment shrinks even more.
And that concerns people like Jamie Barnett. He's a retired rear admiral in the Navy and a member of the organization Mission Readiness, a coalition of former military leaders who see these high ineligibility rates as a matter of national security.
Rear Admiral JAMIE BARNETT (Retired, U.S. Navy; Mission Readiness): The military is much more technologically sophisticated now. We need people who can operate complex sensor systems, weapons systems, aircraft, nuclear reactors.
LYDEN: In a nutshell, critical thinking, solid arithmetic.
Rear Adm. BARNETT: Problem solving. And the other thing about is we also know some of the answers. We know what we can do, but they take a long time to take effect. We have to start now.
LYDEN: Your group, Mission Readiness, urged that Congress pass the child nutrition bill to help reduce childhood obesity and expand the pool of qualified young adults. So what will you do with this new information? How are you going to challenge government and schools?
Rear Adm. BARNETT: We are urging Congress to really consider and incorporate early childhood education into its reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary School Act, formerly known as No Child Left Behind, and basically shifting away from a kindergarten-through-12th-grade concept to a pre-K, pre-kindergarten.
There's great research that shows, I mean, it's already in place, and it's numerous studies that have shown that it can have a real effect. Basically what it showed, that if you start early, you can vastly increase the number of graduates in high school years later.
Conversely, one of the studies also showed that if you have this intervention early on, that you can also keep kids on the right side of the law. There was an alarming indication that the kids who were not in these early childhood education programs, like 70 percent of them had some problem with the law by the age of 18.
LYDEN: When did it happen, do you think? I mean, your group, Mission Readiness, did you look at each other and say, you know, we're just headed in the wrong direction here?
Rear Adm. BARNETT: I was the director of Naval Education and Training at the Pentagon as one of my last tours in the Navy. So it was something I was aware of very much for several years now.
But all of us have this passion for young people, and so many of them want to be able to serve their country, and it's just tragic for them not to be able to because of one of these factors and especially because of educational attainment, because that also has a pretty significant impact not only in national security but our economic security, not to mention the achievement and accomplishment of that individual.
LYDEN: Given the current political climate and the idea that some people think government's done too much, how confident are you that you can intervene and get behind something like early childhood education?
Rear Adm. BARNETT: Well, you know, I think information leads to bipartisanship, and this is one that I think appeals to both sides of the aisle.
You know, national security, plus our children, are two things that I think appeal to everyone. And when we look at these data and indicate that we've got a problem both nationally, for national security and economically, I think that'll spur action.
LYDEN: That was Retired Navy Rear Admiral Jamie Barnett with the group Mission Readiness.
Thank you very much for coming in.
Rear Adm. BARNETT: Thank you so much, Jacki.
LYDEN: Despite these obstacles, Curtis Gilroy says recruitment for all branches of the military is on target. Gilroy is the Defense Department's point person for recruitment of the active duty force.
Dr. CURTIS GILROY (Accession Policy Director, U.S. Defense Department): It's important to recognize that enlistment standards really have not changed at all over the years. The services continue to meet not only their numerical recruiting goals but also their goals in terms of education and in terms of aptitude.
Aptitude is really important. Individuals need to be able to think and solve problems, have an understanding of mathematics, express themselves verbally and so on. And we find, through empirical evidence, that the higher-aptitude individuals are much easier to train, and they perform much better on the job.
The other aspect or dimension of education is the possession of a high school diploma. The high school diploma graduates have a proven record of successfully completing their term of enlistment. And for that reason, we're also troubled by the relatively high high-school dropout rates, particularly in inner cities and other disadvantaged areas.
LYDEN: But some years ago, the Army did start to accept recruits with lower academic test scores and prior felony arrest records. So standards have changed.
Dr. GILROY: Well, no, not really. It's a question of the extent to which each of the services permits the enlistment of those with certain waivers.
Waivers have always been a part of the enlistment process, and they go up and down, depending upon the particular challenges of the recruiting environment.
LYDEN: Has there been any thinking outside the box to address this, something the Army and the military might do?
Dr. GILROY: Oh, we're doing a fair amount, all the services, including the Army. Our recruiters, of which there are 15 to 17,000 of them today for the active duty force alone, are doing their best to convince young people to stay in school and to study. That's the most important thing.
Getting that high school diploma is a ticket not only to the military but, of course, to colleges and universities and for private-sector employment.
LYDEN: So what do you think about the Education Trust report? Is it a blinking red light?
Dr. GILROY: Well, it's a very interesting report, which unfortunately paints an accurate picture of a significant issue facing education in this country today. Now it's not new. This finding of relatively low standardized test scores of many of our youth is an issue that the Defense Department has been concerned about for some time.
We're the largest employer of youth in the nation, of course, and we're concerned that the pool from which we draw our recruits is shrinking.
LYDEN: That's Curtis Gilroy of the Defense Department. He spoke with me from his office at the Pentagon.
And thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. GILROY: Thank you, Jacki. My pleasure.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Kaleb Nation was just 21 years old when his novel "Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse," was published in 2009. For our series "You Must Read This," in which authors recommend a book they love, Nation suggests readers take a look at the young adult novel "If I Stay," by Gayle Forman. It's an unconventional thriller about a young girl facing big life choices.
Mr. KALEB NATION (Author, "Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse"): I cheat on books regularly. Were I to write my confessions, I would have to admit to buying books for purely aesthetic reasons. Some I bought for their covers; some for the feel of the paper; and some I had a genuine interest in - until a newer, glossier novel caught my eye.
My first encounter with Gayle Forman's "If I Stay" began like most of my romances - for purely physical reasons. But something told me this book was the one. And sometimes, you just can't let a special book go.
A novel about a teenage musician is a far departure from the traditional model of a thriller. There are no ruthless men with guns, no diabolical lawyers, no serial murderers. Although it may not be a thriller in the traditional sense, it incorporates the one perpetual question that lies at the heart of every suspense novel: Will the protagonist survive?
The twist that Forman incorporates, however, is that the answer lies with the protagonist herself. The book centers on Mia, a young cellist whose life is imperfect but securely ordinary. She grapples with typical teenage dilemmas, but these seemingly imperative issues are quickly forgotten when an accident kills her and her family. Mia finds herself trapped in a world somewhere between life and death.
Like a traditional thriller, this is a novel based upon choices. However, the choices aren't which villain to chase, which door to open, or which agent was leaking information. The main character must choose between returning to her destroyed life, or simply letting it all go. And like any great thriller, neither option affords an easy alternative.
This is perhaps the most important lesson I learned from Forman, one that I strive to incorporate in all my novels. Tension isn't necessarily created by murderers with pitchforks. It can exist by confronting the protagonist with an impossible decision, and seeing what happens.
With every turn of the page, I felt Mia's decision lurking just around the corner. Mia's predicament evoked such anxiety from me because her internal conflict was so far from natural, so far from anything I've had to experience.
My fear heightened the moment her subconscious mind realized her loved ones had died, and she had to make the ultimate decision. Which life would she choose? Which life would I choose?
I hadn't planned on getting serious about "If I Stay." It was a passing fancy with a gorgeous cover, but every moment I spent reading Forman's masterpiece drew me in more.
Whether you're talking about a thriller, a young adult novel or a first date, it's the connection you feel that makes you want to learn more. Because of my connection with Mia, my relationship with buying, reading and writing books has never been the same.
SIEGEL: "If I Stay" is by Gayle Forman. Kaleb Nation's most recent book is "Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse." You can find this, and other recommendations in our "You Must Read This" series, at npr.org/books. You can also find NPR Books on Facebook. Just click "like" to get recommendations, new stories and more from our community of readers.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, a mysterious and advanced culture flourished in the Eastern and Midwestern United States. It's called the Hopewell tradition, and a new exhibition of artifacts is raising fresh questions about these ancient Americans.
From member station WNIN in Evansville, Indiana, Micah Schweizer reports.
MICAH SCHWEIZER: Workers building a road damage an ancient burial mound.
(Soundbite of music from film, "Raiders of the Lost Ark")
SCHWEIZER: An unexpected treasure trove of silver and copper pours from the ground.
(Soundbite of film, "Raiders of the Lost Ark")
SCHWEIZER: Only it's not a movie. The year is 1988, and the bulldozer operator digging in a southwest Indiana field decides to grab some of the treasure. He goes to prison for looting.
Just a few miles away, on a windswept day, more southwestern Indiana farmland - fields of corn-stalk stubble and gentle, rolling hills.
Ms. MICHELLE GREENAN (Archeologist): No. What youre seeing here is a complex of earthen structures that were very purposefully, and very specifically, built along this cultural landscape.
SCHWEIZER: Michelle Greenan is an archeologist and curator at the Indiana State Museum.
Ms. GREENAN: Theres a number of mounds here - probably 20; maybe even more -earthen architectural features that were built for different purposes.
SCHWEIZER: Like ceremonies or burial. This is called the Mann site, spelled M-A-N-N, named after the farmer who owned these sprawling, 500 acres. Two of the earthen structures are among the biggest mounds built anywhere by the Hopewell -not a tribe, but more of a way of life that flourished between about 150 and 450 C.E. The culture was named by archeologists in the 1800s.
Amateur archeologist Charlie Lacer began walking the Mann fields in the 1950s, collecting what he found.
Mr. CHARLIE LACER: You could find stuff that you could not find any other site around here. I mean, there is just tons of material there. You couldnt pick up everything you saw. You had to be kind of selective, particularly if youre carrying this stuff in your pockets.
SCHWEIZER: Lacer stuffed a lot into his pockets - 40,000 artifacts that he donated to the Indiana State Museum two years ago. Four hundred pieces are now on display in nearby Evansville - for the first time ever.
The exhibition is titled "Cherished Possessions: The Mann Hopewell Legacy of Indiana," but it was nearly called "Indianas Egypt."
(Soundbite of film, "Raiders of the Lost Ark")
Mr. HARRISON FORD (Actor): (As Indiana Jones) Archeology is the search for facts, not truths. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyrees philosophy class is right down the hall.
SCHWEIZER: In the end, the attempt at archeology a la Indiana Jones lost out to historical precision. But Michelle Greenan says the exhibitions almost-name gives a sense of the Mann sites importance.
Ms. GREENAN: Its a sleeping giant, and its going to take its place as one of the most important archeological sites in North America.
Mr. MIKE LINDERMAN: Its like Vegas for archeologists.
SCHWEIZER: Mike Linderman, who manages state historic sites in western Indiana, says the Mann site is bigger than the more famous Hopewell sites in Ohio, and its filled with even more exotic materials - like obsidian glass thats been traced to the Yellowstone Valley in Wyoming and with it, grizzly bear incisor teeth.
Mr. LINDERMAN: Grizzly bear, obviously, are not from southwestern Indiana, never have been. And theres a theory out there now that instead of being trade items, these items are actually being collected by the people from Mann site on rite-of-passage trips theyre taking out to the west.
You know, its something big if youve killed a grizzly bear, and you can bring its teeth back to Indiana.
SCHWEIZER: Jaguars and panthers arent from Indiana, either, but they show up as beautifully detailed carvings. Put them together with clay figurines that have slanted eyes - not a Hopewell feature - and Linderman says we could be looking at a connection between Indiana and Central or South America.
And this just scratches the surface, so to speak. In 2006, Staffan Peterson did the archeological version of an MRI scan of 100 acres at the site. Anytime his equipment detected an archeological feature, a dot showed up on a map.
Mr. STAFFAN PETERSON: And every day, wed download our data, and our jaws would drop. It was kind of like buckshot; there were so many. And we were able to map out upwards of 8,000 archeological features.
SCHWEIZER: Two of the most notable are what Peterson calls wood-henges - like Stonehenge, but made of wooden posts.
Mr. PETERSON: These things may be unique in the country.
SCHWEIZER: But there may be an even more remarkable discovery, one that could re-write history books. Mike Linderman says scientists are starting tests on what looks like evidence of lead smelting.
Mr. LINDERMAN: Lead is not known to have been processed or smelted in North America until the French arrive.
SCHWEIZER: About a thousand years after the Hopewell culture.
Mr. LINDERMAN: And if it can be proven that the people at Mann site were smelting lead, that would really, really be big news.
SCHWEIZER: Next, archeologists hope some targeted digs can answer at least a few of the Mann sites mysteries.
For NPR News, Im Micah Schweizer in Evansville, Indiana.
SIEGEL: And you can see some of those mysterious Hopewell artifacts, including the teeth of an ancient grizzly bear, at our website, npr.org.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
I'm Robert Siegel.
And we begin this hour with oil. Prices are up, and that means many of us are also paying more at the pump. In a moment, what to expect from gas prices in 2011. But first, to Alaska.
BLOCK: You've probably heard of the Arctic National Wildlife refuge and the battle over whether oil companies should be allowed to drill there. Well, now, a new battle is developing over some nearby public land. It's called the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, or NPRA. The government is working on a plan to guide drilling there.
And as NPR's Jeff Brady reports, environmental groups want some of the reserves set aside as wilderness.
JEFF BRADY: Before talking about the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, Lois Epstein of The Wilderness Society pulls out a big map in her Anchorage office.
(Soundbite of footsteps)
Ms. LOIS EPSTEIN (Arctic Program Director, The Wilderness Society): Sit down for a second.
BRADY: Her finger moves east to west, starring at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, then across state land on the North Slope before settling on the NPRA. It's huge, about the size of Indiana. Originally, it was set aside for the military, then in the 1970s, reserved for domestic oil production.
Today, the reserve is mostly undisturbed, and Epstein is among those who want parts of it protected.
Ms. EPSTEIN: The Bureau of Land Management recognizes already that there are some special areas in the reserve - Teshekpuk Lake, which is known for its bird life.
BRADY: Epstein says if you really want a feel for what the NPRA is like, John Schoen at the Audubon Society is the guy to talk to. He spends a lot of time there camping and doing research.
Mr. JOHN SCHOEN (Senior Scientist, Alaska Audubon Society): This is truly wild country. You see grizzly bears walking down a valley. You run into wolves.
BRADY: Schoen says during certain times of year, you can see huge bands of caribou.
Mr. SCHOEN: And they're moving through, and you just see waves of these animals. It must be like what Lewis and Clark saw with the bison when they came across the country.
BRADY: The caribou are important for Alaska natives, like Delbert Rexford. He's a community leader from Barrow and says any development in the petroleum reserve has to consider caribou migration.
Mr. DELBERT REXFORD (Member, Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope): Well, we don't want that interrupted. I mean, they've been migrating and using a certain migration route for - since time immemorial, for centuries.
BRADY: Rexford says it's also important to protect sensitive areas where geese molt. The birds shed their feathers in the summer and are vulnerable because they can't fly. But those molting areas are near some of the richest oil deposits in the NPRA.
Ms. MARILYN CROCKETT (Executive Director, Alaska Oil and Gas Association): Mother Nature has been very cruel to the oil and gas industry.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BRADY: Marilyn Crockett heads the Alaska Oil and Gas Association. She says production is declining on state land, and now, companies must turn to federal land on the North Slope. She dismisses any talk of creating wilderness in the petroleum reserve.
Ms. CROCKETT: Frankly, the state of Alaska doesn't need any more wilderness areas. Something on the order of two-thirds of the state is already set aside in wilderness preserves, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas. And so it just would be entirely inappropriate if that's what we end up at the end of the day.
BRADY: The U.S. Geological Survey released an assessment in October that reduces by 90 percent the amount of oil that's likely to be recovered in the NPRA. But even with the reduced estimate, there's still about 900 million barrels of oil in the reserve. That's about twice what the U.S. gets from the Gulf of Mexico in a year.
Over at the Bureau of Land Management office in Anchorage, Bob Schneider says a plan for the NPRA should be finished in about a year. He says Congress laid out several mandates for the huge reserve.
Mr. BOB SCHNEIDER (Anchorage District Manager, Bureau of Land Management): There is a hierarchy, and that's why this plan is dealing with oil and gas leasing. It's not a protection plan, per se, but we are looking at how we can protect sensitive resources at the same time.
BRADY: Meanwhile, the Department of the Interior recently announced a new policy requiring the BLM to create an inventory of land with wilderness characteristics and then protect them. You could argue that nearly all of the NPRA would qualify as wilderness, but that same policy leaves plenty of wiggle room for the BLM to allow drilling within the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Jeff Brady, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The word hon - spelled H-O-N, short for honey - has been part of Baltimore's working class lexicon for decades. But now, the term of endearment has been trademarked for commercial use by a local businesswoman. And as NPR's Jamie Tarabay reports, some in Baltimore aren't happy about it.
JAMIE TARABAY: To certain people in Baltimore, hon isn't just a nice thing to call someone. It's a person: that beehived, cat's-eye-glasses-wearing, working-class woman of the late 1950s and early '60s. If you've ever seen John Waters' 1988 film "Hairspray," you know what she looks like.
(Soundbite of film, "Hairspray")
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: Baltimore, 1962, the heyday of hairdos and hair-don'ts.
Unidentified Woman #1: We shall overcome someday.
Unidentified Woman #2: Not with that hair, you won't.
TARABAY: It's also a place in time - as Mary Rizzo, a historian in all things hon, explains.
Ms. MARY RIZZO: It's very much located in that sort of immediate post-World War II period, when the memory of Baltimore is all about these tight-knit neighborhoods.
TARABAY: Those neighborhoods were places like Hampden, a gritty group of row houses just north of downtown, originally home to white millworkers. Hon was a word they, more than any other group, used.
Ms. RIZZO: At the same time, the people who were outsiders were not welcome and often, those were people of color.
TARABAY: Even today in the majority African-American city, Hampden remains predominantly white, though it's becoming increasingly gentrified.
Along The Avenue, Hampden's main drag, is Cafe Hon. And behind the counter, in a hot-pink chef's coat and rhinestone glasses, is Denise Whiting, the owner of Cafe Hon; the Hon Bar next door; HonFest, an annual festival; and her gift shop, Hon Town - all trademarked. But she says she doesn't own the word hon.
Ms. DENISE WHITING (Owner, Cafe Hon): It absolutely belongs to everyone in Baltimore. I cannot take away noncommercial use of the word. The trademark has to do with commerce.
TARABAY: She said she was prompted into action when another business was manufacturing similarly designed products, and selling them at the airport. This was years ago, but most people didn't know about the trademark until a local newspaper recently reported it.
Her lawyer, Kathryn Goldman, sat in on our interview.
Ms. KATHRYN GOLDMAN (Attorney): A trademark that Denise had spent about 15 years, at that point, building - she built the identity for this. This is her identity, her brand.
TARABAY: But those opposed don't agree.
The halls of social media have been crammed with outrage that Whiting now owns something most people here say belongs to all of them. The hon tradition didn't begin with her, and hasn't always been associated with her restaurant, they say.
Ms. RIZZO: The reaction's been stupendous.
TARABAY: Mary Rizzo, our hon historian.
Ms. RIZZO: These folks have felt that their use of the word hon was part of who they are. And for Denise to be seen as someone who is just using it to make money, is to take away the meaning that they associate with it.
TARABAY: Dozens have picketed. Editorials in local papers have raged. Groups on Facebook call for a boycott of her business.
But on a recent night in Hampden, The Avenue aglow with Christmas lights and families out for dinner, three lonely protesters outside the restaurant were ignored. Inside, Cafe Hon was packed. Still, college student Rachel Avallone says, that word? It's a Baltimore thing, not a Cafe Hon thing.
Ms. RACHEL AVALLONE: It's basically said every other word. Like, my friend's grandmother literally says hon every other word. She's always just like: How are you, hon - or something like that. It's like, everything. If she went to the store, she'd be like: I went to the store, hon.
TARABAY: Not a name or a place but a feeling, she says, belonging to no one - and to everyone.
Jamie Tarabay, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
3-D effects are everywhere these days: in movies, on TV, in video games. But the rush to 3-D may be hitting a bump in the road.
(Soundbite of video game, "Super Mario Brothers")
BLOCK: Nintendo is putting a warning label on its soon-to-be-released handheld game console. The company's website says the 3-D effects could cause vision problems in children under the age of 6. And other manufacturers have issued similar warnings. NPR's Joe Palca reports.
JOE PALCA: So how do you get a 3-D effect from a flat screen? Well, you do it by filming a scene with two cameras.
Ms. AHNA GIRSHICK (Vision Researcher, New York University): Each camera gets a slightly different view, and that creates what's called binocular disparity.
PALCA: That's Ahna Girshick. She's a vision researcher at New York University. Binocular disparity is what you get when you look at the world with two eyes. Each eye sends an image to the brain that sees the world from a slightly different angle.
Ms. GIRSHICK: The brain is accustomed to processing that. And it creates this 3-D impression.
PALCA: Makers of 3-D media are taking advantage of that.
Ms. GIRSHICK: So they're just piggybacking on this mechanism that's already built into our eyes and brains.
PALCA: But there's a problem: We also get some information about how far away an object is by how much we adjust the lens in our eyeball to bring it into focus.
Ms. GIRSHICK: So with a near display - like if you're looking at a TV and you are sitting up close - your eyes actually focus on the surface of the TV, and that's at one distance.
PALCA: But Girshick says if the TV is showing a 3-D image, your brain might think an object is far off in the distance, even though your focus is on the screen right in front of you.
Ms. GIRSHICK: And so these two systems are now in conflict. In the natural world, they're never in conflict.
PALCA: This artificially created conflict can cause eye fatigue and headache, and it's that artificial conflict that's causing some concerns about children using 3-D video games. Vision scientist David Hoffman works at the semiconductor company Mediatek. He says children's visual systems are changing as they grow.
Mr. DAVID HOFFMAN (Vision Scientist, Mediatek): Any time you've introduced something very different than what they're normally exposed to, there's a chance that they begin to adapt to whatever this new condition is.
PALCA: And that would be an unnatural condition that would possibly not be good for them when they weren't playing video games.
Mr. HOFFMAN: Right.
PALCA: There's not a lot of good data about just how much long-term damage these games could cause. They may cause no damage. But some game manufacturers have decided to err on the side of caution, and recommend that young children not use the 3-D mode. Of course, enforcing that recommendation falls to the parents.
Joe Palca, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Thailand, the elephant is a national symbol. Elephants were once used in battle, and they have labored for the logging industry. But since the 1980s, they and their handlers have drifted into cities. In places such as Bangkok, elephants have become a controversial presence. They roam the streets as their handlers beg for spare change.
NPR's Anthony Kuhn traveled to Surin province in Northeastern Thailand to learn about an effort to create a safe place for elephants outside of cities.
(Soundbite of a buffalo horn)
ANTHONY KUHN: The sound of a buffalo horn summons members of the Kui ethnic minority to a pakam or shrine. In the old days, the Kui would offer prayers here before trekking off to the jungles of Cambodia to catch wild elephants.
Eighty-two-year-old Meu Sala-Ngarm is one of the last of the Kui elephant catchers known as morchang. He says he's been mostly unemployed since 1957 when the government banned the catching of wild elephants in order to protect them.
Mr. MEU SALA-NGARM: (Through Translator) When I was young, my parents told me I could get by without anything except elephants. They're rare. They're not like cars or cattle. They roam in the jungle. It takes three months to catch one. You have to take 100 people and 50 domesticated elephants to catch a wild one.
KUHN: Meu has caught more than 50 wild elephants, making him a kru ba. The morchang rode on elephants' shoulders, steering with their legs and lassoing wild elephants with buffalo hide ropes. Wild elephants were hard to catch, Meu says, but they're smart, and domesticating them was easy.
Mr. SALA-NGARM: (Through Translator) There's no real difference between wild elephants and domesticated ones, except for their smell. The wild elephants have a particular, natural smell, but the domesticated elephants acquire a human smell on their skin. Wild elephants find that a bit strange.
(Soundbite of elephant romping)
KUHN: Elephants romp in their pins as their ethnic Kui owners live nearby in wooden houses on stilts. This is Surin province's Ta Klang village, near the confluence of the Chi and Mun rivers, a favorite elephant bathing spot.
The village is the centerpiece of the Elephant Kingdom project. It's designed to keep elephants out of the cities. The project pays elephant handlers, known as mahouts, the equivalent of $265 a month to keep their elephants out of the cities.
Krittipon Sala-Ngarm, who manages the village's elephant study center, says he realizes this is not much money.
Mr. KRITTIPON SALA-NGARM: (Through Translator) I personally disagree with taking elephants into the city like beggars, but I understand why mahouts feel they need to do it. They can't survive on the monthly payments. They have to import elephant food from other provinces every two days.
KUHN: Elephants consume hundreds of pounds of vegetation and dozens of gallons of water a day, so mahouts have a tough time making ends meet. The Elephant Kingdom project is replanting farmland around the village with grass, and in five years, it should have enough for the elephants to eat.
(Soundbite of music)
KUHN: In the meantime, elephants make money performing for tourists, painting, kicking soccer balls and throwing darts at balloons.
(Soundbite of crowd)
KUHN: Thirty-eight-year-old mahout Theerapon Homhuan has brought his elephant back to the village after years of roaming through cities.
Mr. THEERAPON HOMHUAN: (Through Translator) In the city, elephants are uncomfortable. They disturb the urban residents, which worries me. Back here, they're comfortable because they can move freely and they're in their natural environment. They can bathe and live without stress.
KUHN: Theerapon and his neighbors live with three generations of elephants. The grandmother elephant is 68. She has two children and one grandchild. Theerapon says that when they're happy, he's happy.
Mr. HOMHUAN: (Through Translator) I consider elephants a part of my family. If they are absent, I feel like I've lost an arm or leg. We have been together for so long. When I have business to attend to and I leave them one or two days, I always miss them.
KUHN: Elephants caught by the Kui people no longer ferry Siamese kings into battle or haul teak wood out of the forests, but the Kui continue to live lives that intertwine and overlap with those of their elephants.
Theerapon fondly remembers the first elephant he ever cared for, noting with satisfaction that it lived to the ripe old age of 105.
Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Bangkok.
(Soundbite of music)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Americans' paychecks will be a little bigger this month, thanks to a temporary cut in payroll taxes. More take-home pay for workers, though, means less revenue for the government and a bigger federal deficit. President Obama has promised to start a conversation on reducing the deficit as soon as the new Congress is sworn in this week.
It won't be an easy discussion but as NPR's Scott Horsley reports, several key voices in the Senate are already chiming in with ideas.
SCOTT HORSLEY: Lawmakers from both parties joined the president last month when he signed the big tax-cut bill. Despite all the celebration, Mr. Obama didn't kid himself into thinking the bipartisan goodwill would last.
President BARACK OBAMA: There will be moments, I'm certain, over the next couple years in which the holiday spirit won't be as abundant as it is today.
HORSLEY: After all, it's easy and popular for lawmakers to cut taxes and increase government spending. They'll have to do just the opposite to stem the tide of red ink in Washington.
Pres. OBAMA: We've got to make some difficult choices ahead, when it comes to tackling the deficit.
HORSLEY: There's a small, bipartisan group of senators, though, who insist they're ready to make those choices. Virginia Democrat Mark Warner sees trillion-dollar deficits as a ticking time bomb. Better to defuse them voluntarily, he says, than risk an explosion as government creditors get nervous.
Senator MARK WARNER (Democrat, Virginia): It's not a question of if we're going to address this issue; it's a question of when. And I think our sense was, we ought to try to do this on our timelines, and not have it dictated by the financial markets.
HORSLEY: As a starting point, Warner wants to use the recommendations made by the president's own deficit commission last month. He and Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss plan to introduce that commission plan as a bill early this year. Chambliss says they've already been talking regularly with about two dozen Senate colleagues, both Democrats and Republicans.
Senator SAXBY CHAMBLISS (Republican, Georgia): We're not starting with folks on the far right or the far left, who've taken shots at this. We're starting with a group that's in the middle, and we're growing out.
HORSLEY: The deficit commission recommended significant cuts to spending, including Social Security and defense, as well as steps to increase tax revenues. Neither Warner nor Chambliss expects those recommendations to pass Congress as written. But they say lawmakers who object to any part of the plan should have to suggest an alternative.
Standing outside a conference room where Chambliss and Warner briefed reporters, longtime deficit watchdog Maya MacGuineas, of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said she's encouraged by the senators' approach.
Ms. MAYA MACGUINEAS (President, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget): This is the first time in years that I have felt pleasantly optimistic that the political process will actually get ahead of this fiscal problem, and we may see a lot of progress in the coming months.
HORSLEY: President Obama has not fully�endorsed the blueprint from his deficit commission. But he is expected to focus on the issue in his State of the Union address later this month. The president supports some cuts in government spending. But as he told business leaders in Asia this fall, he's strongly opposed to others.
Pres. OBAMA: We are not cutting back on the investments that are essential to America's long-term economic growth - education, clean energy, research and infrastructure. We will make sacrifices but everyone here should know that as long as I'm president, we are not going to sacrifice America's future or our leadership in the world.
HORSLEY: On the revenue side, the deficit commission suggested a major rewrite of the country's tax code. By doing away with deductions and exemptions, the commission argued, the government could raise more money and still have lower tax rates. Chambliss and Warner have endorsed that idea. And President Obama told NPR's�MORNING EDITION he supports the general principle.
Pres. OBAMA: Typically, the idea is simplifying the system, hopefully lowering rates, broadening the base. That's something that I think most economists think would help us propel economic growth. But it's a very complicated conversation.
HORSLEY: The president says that conversation is likely to take a long time. But he wants to begin with lawmakers who are taking the oath this week.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
With college application deadlines looming, 'tis the season of high anxiety for high school seniors. Around the nation, there have been efforts to ease the pressure. But as NPR's Tovia Smith reports, getting schools and parents, and even some kids, to ratchet it down is easier said than done.
But as NPR's Tovia Smith reports, getting schools and parents and even some kids to ratchet it down is easier said than done.
TOVIA SMITH: Welcome to what you might call the calculus class formerly known as AP.
Unidentified Woman: (Singing) Cause the integrals are so delightful.
Unidentified Man: Oh, my goodness. Yeah.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: It's definitely new math at this private school outside Boston, called Beaver Country Day. Gone are those fat, old textbooks and piles of advanced placement practice tests. Instead, students like Sophie Deitz are learning complicated concepts like integration by-parts by making videos about them.
Ms. SOPHIE DEITZ (Student): I want the calculus to be like, a scary monster and then we being like, super heroes. I know, right?
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: It's exactly the kind of high-energy, low-stress kind of learning that Beaver administrators, like Peter Gow, were hoping for when they decided a few years ago to eliminate AP classes.
Mr. PETER GOW (Director College Counseling): I think that pressure to make sure that you had that trophy on your transcript was something that we felt wasn't necessarily that healthy for kids. It didn't seem appropriate to be playing into that.
SMITH: Gow insists his bold move hasnt hurt Beaver kids applying to college. But especially in affluent, highly educated communities, many wouldn't dare risk it given the hyper competitive, ever escalating frenzy around college admissions.
Mr. LEE COFFIN (Dean, Undergraduate Admissions, Tufts University): It is an arms race. it just keeps going up.
SMITH: That's Lee Coffin, admissions dean at Tufts University, one of the few colleges making even a small move to unilaterally disarm.
Mr. COFFIN: Now, if you step back and say, let's take a breath, the risk is that the pack runs past you.
SMITH: Colleges are under pressure to top the national rankings and look most selective, but Coffin says Tufts is now refusing to play the data game.
Mr. COFFIN: Were not trying to be holier than thou, as I say this, but I think these are ways that the colleges unwittingly poured some gasoline on the frenzy. And it all just gets a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more intense, and there are very few rewards for disarming.
Ms. VICKI ABELES (Producer, "The Race to Nowhere"): No one wants to be the first one off the treadmill, and looking at things differently.
SMITH: Vicki Abeles is a mom from California who produced "The Race To Nowhere," a documentary about kids collapsing under the pressure to achieve. The film is becoming something of a rallying point for frustrated parents, who are now pushing for change from the bottom up.
Ms. ABELES: Just last week, we had a parent get up and say, you know, at some point it comes down to civil disobedience - if a bunch of us just say: Were not having our young kids who are in elementary school do the homework, or we're going to keep them home on the test day. I think that you're seeing parents and educators feeling much more empowered.
SMITH: But for every such conscientious objector, there are other parents pushing back. In Rockford, Illinois, for example, when the school board proposed cutting AP classes, Maggie Kasicki complained it would be academic suicide for her kids.
Ms. MAGGIE KASICKI: That very much scares us. If they take this stuff away, we are definitely thinking about private school. We have to make sure our kids can get into college.
SMITH: For the most part, school administrators are just as wary about doing something as drastic as dropping APs. Bob Weintraub is principal of the public high school in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Mr. BOB WEINTRAUB (High School Principal): The reality on the ground is, you have to have AP courses on your transcript, and you have to have As and Bs in them, in order to get into these great schools. Thats just reality. So you know, it might sound harsh, but thats life. Sometimes theres stress, and so maybe this is good preparation for that.
SMITH: Instead of eliminating stress, many schools are focusing on teaching kids to better handle it - with everything from yoga classes and breathing exercises to therapy dogs, and more time for students to vent.
Unidentified Woman #1: Everyone is getting deferred, everyone.
Unidentified Woman #2: Everyone's getting deferred; that's what makes me so nervous.
SMITH: That all may help, but Beaver Country Day School senior Julia Cohen says even the most supportive schools can only do so much, since the pressure to get into a top college really comes from everywhere.
Ms. JULIA COHEN (Student, Beaver Country Day School): People automatically ask you where you want to go. And that just like - always provides more stress, and it's like, my dentist asked me. And it's just like - it just drowns you; you just like, get so eaten up by it.
SMITH: Beaver's head of college counseling, Peter Gow, agrees. The whole system is like an evil machine thats consuming kids, he says. Our school has defanged it, but only as much as any one school can.
Tovia Smith, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Later this week, the focus of the tech industry will be on Las Vegas. Every January, the industry decamps to Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, or CES. It's the largest showcase for just about anything you can plug into an electrical outlet or sync with your wireless.
NPR's Laura Sydell is headed there tomorrow, and before she gets on a plane, she's joining us from San Francisco to talk about what's coming up at CES. And, Laura, what are you most looking forward to checking out at CES this year?
LAURA SYDELL: Well, besides the robot that does massage, which should be really exciting...
(Soundbite of laughter)
SYDELL: You know, one of the things they're having a special section devoted to: Internet-connected appliances. So, you know, your refrigerator could talk to your Facebook page. I think, more importantly, what they're ultimately aiming for with some of these appliances is, for example, you could have a dryer that would let the grid know and the grid would talk back to you. There'd be a conversation and basically it could say, this is a peak time to run your dryer. This is a time when, you know, the grid would prefer it. Things like that.
Or it could let you know, for example, if you were out of milk. Things like that. So, that's something I'm looking forward to. I think that's all kind of interesting and exciting and futuristic and new.
BLOCK: Laura, let's talk about somebody who will not be at CES this year -that's Apple. They don't go to tradeshows. They do their own thing. But we're all keeping in mind the huge success of the Apple iPad. They sold, what, 7.5 million iPads in the first six months that it was on the market. That's just before the holiday shopping season. So, what kind of competition do you think Apple will be getting for its iPad coming out of CES?
SYDELL: Quite a lot. What Apple proved is that there's a real category for this. A lot of people are really interested in it. So you're going to see tons of tablets. You saw some last year, you know, it was a big deal. But now everybody knows they've taken off. But what you will see that'll be great is you're going to see tablets that have cameras on them. So there'll be a camera maybe for taking a picture. There will also be a camera for doing a video chat. Pretty much every manufacturer is coming out with tablets this year.
And you're going to have some with an Android operating system. Microsoft is going to announce its Windows 7 is going to be used now for tablets. So tablets will be everywhere.
BLOCK: What about, Laura, what's new in the world of television? What kinds of advances in the world of TV are we looking at?
SYDELL: You know, overall I would say that this year you're not going to see anything fabulously new. It's all incremental. So last year we saw 3D TV. We're going to see more 3D TV. Last year we saw Internet connected TV, we're going to see more Internet connected TV. The hope is that Google is going to be there with Google TV. But Google has kind of pulled out, so that's taken a little bit of the wind out of the sails of the Internet connected TV.
Still, probably within the next five years, about 50 percent of televisions are going to be connected to the Internet in one form or another. Right now what you're largely seeing is kind of, you know, here's an app for movies or an app for Yahoo or things like that. So, it's not like a direct connection. And, of course, more and more HDTVs. And every year it's, like, which television is the biggest television? You'll see all that kind of stuff.
BLOCK: Now, last year, Laura, CES was a little more subdued because of the down economy, what's it looking like this year in terms of scale and how bullish people are feeling about tech?
SYDELL: It's looking good. This year, clearly the economy is recovering and you're seeing that at CES. So there's going to be 1.6 million square feet of display space there. And that's kind of a record. And I'm thinking, all right, get on my comfortable shoes 'cause I'm going to be doing a lot of walking looking at all those gadgets this year.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: OK, Laura, have a good time.
SYDELL: All right, thanks so much.
BLOCK: That's NPR's Laura Sydell, who is headed tomorrow to Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
There is a generation gap in Iraq. Young Iraqis differ from their parents in attitudes on politics, religion, even on Saddam Hussein. These are the preliminary findings of a new survey of Iraqi youth, a generation born during a brutal dictatorship that experienced an American invasion and witnessed violent religious extremism, often firsthand.
NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Baghdad.
(Soundbite of music)
DEBORAH AMOS: One thing you notice in Iraq, it's a very young country. Sixty-five percent of the population is under 25, and they often express themselves in surprising ways.
These four young men, all under 25, get together to play heavy metal music. Their dark lyrics reflect their view of life in Baghdad.
(Soundbite of music)
AMOS: Abu Ghraib is Iraq's infamous prison, the song has this refrain: War after war is consuming our age, war after war with no limit to rage.
Mr. HUMAM IBRAHIM: It's our life. We live in war. We are raised on war.
Mr. RAFI SA'IB: It talks about our situation, our society.
AMOS: Humam Ibrahim and Rafi Sa'ib say heavy metal music is how they express what they see and what they feel.
Mr. IBRAHIM: It's been seven years, nothing changed. It's getting worse.
Mr. SA'IB: It's worse.
Mr. IBRAHIM: I hate politics.
AMOS: The music is unusual in Iraq, but the anger and disillusion among this group of friends, Christian and Muslim, confirms new findings about young Iraqis, says Eric Davis, a political scientist at Rutgers University.
Professor ERIC DAVIS (Political Science, Rutgers University): I would be less than honest if I didn't report that many of these young people are very, very cynical.
AMOS: Davis has been conducting focus groups across the country, testing attitudes of a generation that sets them apart from their parents.
Prof. DAVIS: The interesting thing is that these young people do not maintain strong sectarian identities.
AMOS: After years of sectarian violence, many young Iraqis fault clerics and political leaders for inciting the hatred that cost so many lives, says Davis. Preliminary surveys reveal another startling attitude among some young Iraqis.
Prof. DAVIS: They actually even reject Islam, because they've come to associate Islam with many of the political figures who have used Islam to promote violence and incite instability for political ends, not for specifically religious ends.
AMOS: Arkan Mohammed is one member of Davis' focus group.
Mr. ARKAN MOHAMMED: (Through Translator) So Iraqi young generation, they are not against Islam as a religion. But they are frustrated right now, as long as the government got controlled by Islamists or these Islamic parties.
AMOS: The youth survey shows a generational divide that extends to other aspects of life, says Davis. Older Iraqis grew up in a closed society under Saddam. For the young, the Internet has opened the door to the world outside.
Prof. DAVIS: What we are seeing here is not just a generational split in the normal sense of the word, but really the opportunity for the younger generation to have access to information that their parents could have never dreamed of.
AMOS: But in a country with car bombs and kidnappings, the Internet is a consuming escape. Those heavy metal guys, Rafi and Humam, say they're on the Web for 10 hours a day.
Mr. SA'IB: You can say Internet is only our friend.
AMOS: So your life is online.
Mr. IBRAHIM: Yeah.
Mr. SA'IB: Yeah. Always.
Mr. IBRAHIM: We can go out, okay. But it's dangerous.
Mr. SA'IB: Yeah. Can escape from our situation online.
AMOS: This is the generation that will inherit Iraq. Davis is preparing a larger study this year.
Prof. DAVIS: I want to try to move beyond just this kind of initial results. But the other thing I would point out that was disturbing to me, there was very, very little historical knowledge.
AMOS: These kids are living Iraq's turbulent history. But here's the thing: The new textbooks, especially the history books now in use, sweep recent events under the rug, says Davis.
Prof. DAVIS: So there is a kind of historical amnesia in many of these textbooks. Saddam is only referred to from time to time, and where it's necessary, as a dictator. So it's almost as if he didn't exist.
AMOS: That historical gap is what Davis will study in his next round of interviews: How will young Iraqis make sense of Iraq's future or understand the present without an accurate accounting of its past.
Deborah Amos, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
A group of Democratic senators trying to reform the practice of filibustering is expected to act on Wednesday. That is the first day of the new Congress and on that day and only that day, the Senate rules can be changed by a simple majority.
So, for Senator Tom Udall and his colleagues, it's Wednesday or never, at least for the next two years. Senator Udall, a freshman Democrat from New Mexico, insists that he does not want to do away with the filibuster. Instead, he wants to rewrite the rules for when and how it's used. For one, a filibuster could still be used to hold up the final vote on a bill, but it could not be used earlier to block debate entirely. What's more, if Senator Udall gets his way, the act of filibustering would once again require some effort.
Senator TOM UDALL (Democrat, New Mexico): A filibuster, as it is understood by the American people - and, I think, senators that have served a long time - is a way of expressing your opinion. And what we've turned it into is, you file a filibuster and you go home. And so what we want to do is, basically, if 41 senators vote for more debate, we'd go to more debate. And it's what I would call a talking filibuster.
And so in the simplest terms, it's bringing a filibuster back to "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." You stand up, and you have to speak on the issue you really care about.
SIEGEL: But would that mean in practice that - let's say a senator placed a hold on a nomination, say, for an ambassadorship or for a deputy secretary of an agency. In order to oppose a vote on that, the senator and a few of his colleagues would actually hold the floor and talk?
Sen. UDALL: Well, there are two reforms here. One has to do with secret holds. So we're going to make secret holds transparent. We're going to make a senator own his hold and basically, bring those out into the open. The other part of your question really goes to, can you filibuster a nomination? And you can still filibuster a nomination under the rules changes that we're proposing.
SIEGEL: The retiring Ohio Republican senator, George Voinovich, said here last week that Democrats are shortsighted to do this because he thinks you'll probably be in the minority in two years, and that you won't be able to influence outcomes with the very rules that you're hoping to change. You'll wish you had the filibuster, he said, by that time.
Sen. UDALL: Well, as you mentioned earlier, we aren't changing the actual filibuster. We're modifying around the edges. We're making more transparency. We're trying to do this in a bipartisan way. We're trying to protect minority rights. We're trying to make sure that the minority can amend. That's one of the big Republican complaints, is that they don't get the amendments that they want.
And so we're hoping to structure something that's fair to all the parties. But I think we really need to look hard at the rules that allow the minority to block the majority from governing.
SIEGEL: Is your proposed rule to guarantee the minority the right to bring their amendments to the floor, is that a tacit admission that the past couple of years have not only been about a Republican obstruction through filibusters, but the complaint that otherwise, they haven't been able to do anything? They haven't been able to amend bills as they would like to.
Sen. UDALL: Well, I think what it's a tacit admission of is, we've had real warfare when it comes to these rules. And it doesn't matter who's in the majority or who's in the minority; we've had a situation where there's been abuse of the rules. Now, I will say, the last two years, if you just count up filibusters, have set a record.
We're, in fact, in a constant state of filibuster. There were 89 petitions that were filed to break filibusters in the last two years. Lyndon Johnson, when he was the majority leader from 1954 to 1961, only moved to cut off debate once.
SIEGEL: Well, Senator Udall, thanks a lot for talking with us.
Sen. UDALL: Thank you, a real pleasure. Take care.
SIEGEL: Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, spoke to us from Santa Fe.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Senior Navy officers in Norfolk, Virginia, are investigating a raunchy, homemade video made several years ago. It includes gay slurs and sexually suggestive scenes. The video was shown to thousands of sailors aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and it stars a Navy captain who is now the ship's commanding officer.
NPR's Tom Bowman has our report. But first, a warning: The story includes material that some listeners may find offensive.
TOM BOWMAN: The video opens with three officers seated in a ward room aboard the Enterprise. In the middle is the executive officer, the XO, the number two officer on the ship, Captain Owen Honors. It appears, through careful editing, that Honors is also portraying the two men beside him, though Navy officials arent sure. One is dressed as an aviator, wearing sunglasses. The aviator insults a third man, a SWO - which stands for surface warfare officer.
(Soundbite of video)
Captain OWEN HONORS (USS Enterprise): This evening, all of you bleeding hearts - and you, fag SWO boy - why don't you just go ahead and hug yourselves for the next 20 minutes or so because there is a really good chance you're going to be offended tonight.
BOWMAN: Seated between them was the executive officer, the XO, the number two officer on the ship, Captain Owen Honors. The videos were shot in 2006 and 2007. Just last May, Honors took command of the Enterprise. In the video, Honors introduces another segment, called "Chicks in the Shower."
Capt. HONORS: This is certainly the most popular video of any of the XO movie videos. It's also the one that's landed me with the most complaints. This evening, we've got some different chicks in the shower, in a clip that was previously too sensitive to show. However, we have protected their identities.
(Soundbite of music)
BOWMAN: Captain Honors is then shown padding around the ship in bathrobe and shower cap. He pokes his head into showers, and finds two men pretending to wash each other. In another shower, two women. He shakes his head. At the time, the ship was deployed to the Middle East.
Honors is a 1983 Naval Academy graduate who flew F-14 warplanes on 85 combat missions, including some in Afghanistan. Now, he's at the center of an investigation just as the Enterprise is set to leave on another six-month deployment to the Middle East.
Commander Chris Sims, a spokesman for Honors' higher command in Norfolk, said in a statement that the videos are clearly inappropriate, and an investigation has begun. The videos were obtained by the Norfolk Virginian Pilot newspaper, which reported there were complaints on board the ship at the time.
Derek Vander Schaaf, a former Pentagon inspector general, says the fact that the videos were shown over a two-year period is especially troubling.
Mr. DEREK VANDER SCHAAF (Former Pentagon Inspector General): Now, incidents like that can happen; that's to be expected. But the fact that it didn't get clamped down on, that they continued to show the carrier-made film - question is, why did this go on, time after time?
BOWMAN: Vander Schaaf was a top investigator for the Tailhook scandal. That was a 1991 Navy aviator convention that devolved into drunken debauchery. Dozens of fighter pilots were accused of sexually assaulting women. Some were formally disciplined. Vander Schaaf says the Enterprise videos are not as bad as a Tailhook scandal. But he wonders if any lessons were learned from that time.
Mr. VANDER SCHAAF: It is rather surprising that there's officers involved, and they are aviation officers who should have realized, you know, what happened during the Tailhook thing, and here they are - rather improper behavior.
BOWMAN: Some current and former Navy officers say key questions for investigators include whether any of Captain Honors' superiors were aware of the tapes or the complaints. And if so, what did they do about it?
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
I'm Robert Siegel.
And it's time for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: First, today, that ubiquitous company, Facebook, has gotten a major vote of confidence worth a lot of money. Goldman Sachs is investing almost half a billion dollars in the social networking site. The news was first reported by The New York Times. The deal adds to considerable speculation about Facebook going public. And it suggests the company would be worth about $50 billion if its stock were sold in the public markets.
NPR's Jim Zarroli has our story.
JIM ZARROLI: It's pretty obvious why Goldman Sachs wants to invest in Facebook. It's one of the most heavily visited websites on Earth and it's potential for profit is enormous. And there's another lure for Goldman. If and when Facebook decides to go public, Goldman will be sitting pretty, says Internet analyst Greg Sterling.
Mr. GREG STERLING (Internet Analyst): It virtually guarantees that Goldman will be the lead firm or the firm to take the company public. And it could make a tremendous amount of money in that context.
ZARROLI: Until now, it hasn't been so clear that Facebook is eager to go public. Some of the fastest growing Internet companies like Twitter and Groupon are still privately held. That's probably due in part to the fact that the stock market was so weak after the financial crisis. But now, stocks have rebounded and a lot of technology companies are still holding back.
Scott Kessler is an Internet analyst at Standard and Poor's.
Mr. SCOTT KESSLER (Internet Analyst, Standard and Poor's): The reality is that the IPO markets, specifically for Internet companies has been, I'd say, curiously quiet.
ZARROLI: And Facebook is the most notable holdout. Not long ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked in a "60 Minutes" interview whether an IPO was in the wings. He answered, maybe. For Zuckerberg and his investors, an IPO would mean a huge personal windfall. But the company itself would face much more scrutiny from federal regulators. Here was venture capitalist Jim Breyer, one of Facebook's biggest investors, at a conference in Germany last year.
Mr. JIM BREYER (Venture Capitalist): We like the fact that we're private. I'm on several public boards and I can promise you that we spend more time in accounting, litigation and Sarbanes-Oxley updates than often on product strategy.
ZARROLI: To minimize the regulatory scrutiny they face, companies like Facebook are required to keep their total number of investors at a minimum. But the clock may be ticking. Right now, if Facebook investors want to sell their shares, they need to go to secondary markets not accessible to the public. The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating the way these secondary markets operate. And that could end up forcing companies like Facebook to be more transparent.
Then, too, despite Facebook's valuation, its revenues are still small compared to Internet giants like Google and Amazon. If Facebook is to live up to its potential, it needs to capitalize on some of the growth areas in digital media like mobile phone apps.
Again, Scott Kessler.
Mr. KESSLER: Clearly the so-called smartphone revolution has contributed significant additional demand for not just Facebook services, but also additional offerings from the company that, you know, probably are just kind of twinkles in their eye at this point.
ZARROLI: Going public would give Facebook access to a huge pool of capital it needs to invest in new technologies, and also to continue expanding overseas. In the long run, that may tempt the company to plunge into the IPO market, even though such a move would come with tradeoffs.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And Im Melissa Block.
Unidentified Woman: I, state your name.
Governor-Elect JERRY BROWN (Democrat, California): I, Jerry Brown...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Woman: Do solemnly swear...
Governor BROWN: ...do solemnly swear.
BLOCK: In California, whats old is new again. Democrat Jerry Brown was sworn in as governor today. He first held that office for two terms, starting in 1975. Things were tight back then, but now Brown faces a massive budget shortfall and political gridlock.
John Myers is Sacramento bureau chief for member station KQED. He joins us now. Hi, John.
JOHN MYERS: Hi, Melissa.
BLOCK: And Jerry Brown, as we mentioned, served two terms as governor before, but he's certainly inheriting a state now with a lot of troubles, especially money troubles. What did he say today about how he plans to fix California's many problems?
MYERS: Well, I think in summary, you could say really what he told everybody is get ready for some tough medicine. I think just about everyone has to expect that, it seems. You know, his first state budget proposal comes out a week from today and we are already hearing that he's going to propose two things that nobody likes: deep cuts and some taxes.
Now, California is projected to come up $28 billion short over the next year and a half. Brown reportedly is going to propose deep cuts, including some that his fellow Democrats won't like. And we've been told he will probably ask voters to cast a ballot on the extension of some temporary tax increases, ask them to go to the ballot. That vote could come as soon as the end of springtime.
And again, these are things no doubt are going to earn him criticism from both the left and the right. And you got the feeling today Brown knew that, and so he used his brief inaugural remarks to ask everyone, particularly here in the State House in Sacramento, to answer what sounded like a higher calling.
Governor BROWN: We can overcome the sharp divisions that leave our politics in perpetual gridlock, but only if we reach into our heart and find that loyalty, that devotion to California, above and beyond our narrow perspectives.
MYERS: That devotion to California, he used the phrase a couple of times and he made it, you know, almost as a look back in his inaugural address to what his ancestors faced when they arrived in California before the Gold Rush, said they had a higher calling.
And really what he's asking for is this lessening of partisan tension, and that's really what he's got to resolve. And that's going to be hard to do.
BLOCK: Yeah, and we heard him there, John, mentioning specifically perpetual gridlock. Do you get the sense that he has a plan or a strategy for putting politics aside and getting stuff done?
MYERS: It's going to be interesting to watch and I think some people are going to be skeptical. For a guy who's lived his entire life in politics - he's 72 years old - he's been on every side of every issue, it seems like - as governor, as Mayor, as the state's attorney general.
You know, one longtime observer of Brown told me this morning that Jerry Brown may have just found the exact right time to be governor because if you think about it, in the 1970s, he was famous for preaching about an era of limits. Well, this is in fact when Californians are going to need to hear that, so the thinking goes.
And so one of the, you know, sayings that Jerry Brown often applied to his job, probably is true also. He always said that governing is like paddling a canoe -you paddle a little to the left, you paddle a little to the right, and you stay straight down the middle. And I think that's what he's going to have to do as governor.
BLOCK: Of course, he is taking over from the Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Expecting a very different governorship under Jerry Brown?
MYERS: Well, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a Hollywood blockbuster. Let's face it, I think Jerry Brown is more like reality TV.
(Soundbite of laughter)
MYERS: Small screen, less scripted, more gritty. You know, he thanked Schwarzenegger today. He said he did some good things. But I think you're going to see Jerry Brown less interested in the optics of running the state. And really, he's going to be more interested in old-fashioned politicking -political wrangling, dialog, arm twisting up. It'll be interesting to see if he can do it.
BLOCK: OK, John, thanks so much.
MYERS: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's John Myers, Sacramento bureau chief from member station KQED, talking about today's inaugural of Jerry Brown as governor of California.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
For the past two years, the Republican Party has been led by its chairman, Michael Steele. His tenure has been marked by controversy and criticism, even as the party made historic gains in November's midterm elections. Steele is now seeking re-election to another two-year term. That election will be held next week. And Steele has not one, but four, longtime Republican challengers.
The candidates held a debate this afternoon in Washington, and NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea was there.
DON GONYEA: It has been a rocky couple of years for Michael Steele. He's been targeted for lavish spending, for taking large speaking fees. There was that incident where staffers used RNC credit cards to entertain potential donors at a strip club. And there's the committee's financial state - it's in deep debt.
In today's debate, the first candidates to make an opening statement was former ambassador Ann Wagner, of Missouri. And her first words were directed at Steele's leadership.
Ms. ANN WAGNER (Candidate, Republican National Committee Chairman): It is time for some tough love at the Republican National Committee. How can an organization that has lost its credibility, is $20 million in debt, is steeped in mismanagement, distractions and drama, actually lead us into the next election cycle of 2012 and offer change?
GONYEA: Steele defended his record.
Mr. MICHAEL STEELE (Chairman, Republican National Committee): Im a glass-half-full kind of guy. I don't see the crisis as some may see it.
GONYEA: And, he says, all you need to do is look at the results.
Mr. STEELE: My record stands for itself. We won.
GONYEA: The event was sponsored by Americans for Tax Reform; the conservative website the Daily Caller; and the Susan B. Anthony List, which backs female candidates who oppose abortion rights. All of the RNC candidates today spoke of improving fundraising, and of promoting candidates who have traditional, conservative Republican values.
Each backed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as being between a man and a woman. Each promised to bring young people into the Republican Party, and to harness new technology.
At one point, they were asked what positions would disqualify someone from being a Republican. Saul Anunzis is the former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party.
Mr. SAUL ANUNZIS (Candidate, Republican National Committee Chairman): I would kind of use Ronald Reagan's line that if someones with us 80 percent of the time, then theyre probably a Republican.
GONYEA: Wisconsin GOP Chairman Reince Priebus took a much tougher stand on the same question.
Mr. REINCE PRIEBUS (Chairman Candidate, Republican National Committee): If you're pro-abortion, pro-stimulus, pro-GM bailout, pro-AIG - well, you know, guess what? You might not be a Republican.
GONYEA: That prompted a reaction from Michael Steele, who said the party risks losing if it sets rules to keep people out.
Mr. STEELE: This country is much bigger than we think it is sometimes. I see the job of the chairman as the standard bearer - is to one, uphold that platform; but to recognize that everyone who comes into this party will have some problem with this platform. But we cannot be a party that sits back with a litmus test, and excludes.
GONYEA: Steele was low-key throughout the debate, a contrast to the fiery personality he often reveals in interviews and on cable television. There were questions about how the new party leader would reach out to the Tea Party, which has been quick to challenge Republicans it doesn't see as being sufficiently conservative.
Candidate Maria Cino, herself a former longtime RNC official, put it this way.
Ms. MARIA CINO (Chairman Candidate, Republican National Committee): If we've learned anything from the 2010 elections from our friends in the tea parties - is that we have to be focused. We have to stick to our principles of cutting taxes and cutting spending.
GONYEA: Only 168 people will vote in the RNC election. Delegates are mostly state party officials. You need 85 to win; the vote takes place next week.
Don Gonyea, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Now a remembrance. The British actor Pete Postlethwaite died yesterday from cancer. He was 64.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Postlethwaite became an international film star in 1993, when he appeared in the movie "In the Name of the Father." He starred with Daniel Day-Lewis, playing his father - both of them in prison, both falsely accused in IRA plots.
(Soundbite of film, "In the Name of the Father")
Mr. PETE POSTLETHWAITE (Actor): (As Giuseppe Conlon) I'm scared I'm going to die here, among strangers.
Mr. DANIEL DAY-LEWIS (Actor): (As Gerry Conlon) You're not (BEEP) dying, all right? Can I not say a thing without you (BEEP) contradicting me?
Mr. POSTLETHWAITE: Scared to leave your mother behind?
SIEGEL: That performance, as a dying father, earned Pete Postlethwaite an Academy Award nomination.
BLOCK: His rugged appearance and his quiet, commanding presence made him one of Hollywood's most distinctive character actors. He was not a household name, but his performances breathed life into each of his films.
SIEGEL: That includes "The Usual Suspects," and a turn as Friar Lawrence in Baz Luhrmann's modern take on "Romeo and Juliet."
(Soundbite of film, "Romeo and Juliet")
Mr. POSTLETHWAITE: (As Friar Lawrence) These violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume, the sweetest honeys, loathsome in its own deliciousness. Therefore, love moderately...
SIEGEL: Shakespeare was very familiar to Pete Postlethwaite. Before his film career, he performed on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Just two years ago, he got the chance to play a role he had always wanted: King Lear.
(Soundbite of play, "King Lear")
Mr. POSTLETHWAITE: (As King Lear) I would do such things. What they are yet, I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. You think I'll weep. No, I'll not weep.
SIEGEL: Pete Postlethwaite also took breaks from dramatic work to appear in the occasional big-budget action blockbuster.
(Soundbite of film, "The Lost World: Jurassic Park")
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. POSTLETHWAITE: (As Roland Tembo) Let's get this movable feast under way.
BLOCK: There he is as a big-game hunter in the sequel to "Jurassic Park." And last year, he appeared in three back-to-back hits: "Inception," "Clash of the Titans" and the Boston crime drama "The Town."
SIEGEL: On WHYY's FRESH AIR, Terry Gross asked Postlethwaite where he drew his strength from, as an actor.
Mr. POSTLETHWAITE: I don't know. Sometimes, I don't know how you do these things. I mean, it's a bit like asking a centipede which leg it sets off with, do you know what I mean? I mean, I don't know. A centipede just walks, doesn't it? You know, it just goes sometimes.
BLOCK: Pete Postlethwaite is survived by his wife and two children, and a long list of memorable performances.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
As you have no doubt noticed at the gas pump, gasoline prices are back up. According to AAA's Daily Fuel Gauge Report, the national average price of a gallon of regular is now over $3. Why? Well, that's our question for Phil Flynn, senior market analyst for PFGBEST Research in Chicago.
Mr. Flynn, what's the answer? Why?
Mr. PHIL FLYNN (Senior Market Analyst, PFGBEST Research): Well, partly because the economy is getting better, believe it or not. We're seeing more demand, not only here in the United States, but throughout the globe, and that's driving up the price. But I wish that was all that there was to it. To be honest with you, what we're seeing in the price of gasoline shouldn't be happening.
SIEGEL: What are you talking about? What has happened that has aggravated this problem?
Mr. FLYNN: Well, I think if you look over the past few weeks, you have to go back to the France strikes. A few months ago, of course, because of the France austerity package, France shut down some major refineries. And when those refineries went down, Europe was scrambling to get supplies - supplies that would normally end up here in the United States.
And then after that, you had all these refinery problems. You had a refinery going down in Venezuela. You had one going down in St. Croix, one down in the East Coast. And before you knew it, we see these gasoline prices surging forward.
SIEGEL: So as we try to figure out if what we're seeing at the gas stations nowadays is the new normal, or back to what it would obviously have been absent the recession, what is it? Is it - are we at an unusually high period, or is it getting used to it, it's going still higher?
Mr. FLYNN: Well, I - I mean, there's projections out there that people are going to see $5 a gallon in the next two years. To be honest with you, I don't think that's going to happen. I think prices are ahead of themselves. In fact, if you look at the price of crude oil, which did hit a two-year high, the price of gasoline has even exceeded that. So gasoline prices should not be this high, and we should see these prices start to come back down.
But we have this situation where the U.S. dollar is very weak. We've seen a lot of stimulus to the U.S. economy. That generally puts more upward pressure on the price of oil and gasoline. Part of the reason is because the dollar becomes weaker, and the price of crude oil is priced in dollars. And in a global marketplace when we see the price of the dollar go down, oil prices go up.
SIEGEL: But does that mean that in other parts of the world, where people are filling up their cars with fuel that they pay for with euros or yen or whatever, that they are not experiencing as steep an increase as we are here using the dollar at the pump?
Mr. FLYNN: No, because the euro has been relatively strong. They're not feeling this latest increase. Though in Europe, they are feeling the increase in other ways because of their very cold winter.
I think the other thing you have to acknowledge here, what's happening, when we look at the gasoline market overall, you know, the United States isn't the only game in town anymore. It used to be whatever the U.S. consumers did - you know, whether they drove more or whether they drove less - really determined what gasoline prices did.
But now, of course, with the growing competition from China and from the emerging markets, they are really having a major impact on what we pay for a gallon of gasoline. In fact, if you go back to last year, for the first time since the 1960s, the United States was actually a net exporter of gasoline. Instead of the U.S. importing more and more from other countries, we're actually exporting to other countries. So that has become a major new development in the gasoline market that we haven't seen for decades.
SIEGEL: Phil Flynn, thanks for talking with us about this.
Mr. FLYNN: Thanks, Robert.
SIEGEL: Phil Flynn is senior market analyst for PFGBEST Research in Chicago.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
While we're on the subject of 3-D, we wondered how eagerly Americans are rushing into the third dimension in movie theaters and on television. So we've called up David Cohen, who is an editor at Variety where he covers 3-D, and he joins us now from NPR West in Culver City, California. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID COHEN (Editor, Variety): Hi Robert, first-time guest, long-time listener.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: And around this time last year, "Avatar" was on its way to record-breaking box-office receipts because a lot of people were going to see it and because they were willing to pay more to see it on 3-D. So we were starting to hear the obits for 2-D. A year later, what's the score?
Mr. COHEN: I would say that what you're seeing this year is 3-D having some growing pains but continuing to grow. When we look at 2010, most of the run of "Avatar" was in 2010. So there's a vast clump of box office in 3-D at the beginning of the year, and then that was followed up by "Alice in Wonderland," which was also a monster hit, fueled in great measure by 3-D.
What you then began to get into, though, was efforts of the studios to sort of exploit the format, because with 3-D they finally found something that they can charge extra for. So the incentive is to just get something that's 3-D out into theaters and charge extra for it, whether it's really good or not.
And so you had some inferior 3-D titles, that is to say where the 3-D wasn't very good, which is a separate question from whether the movies are good, and I'd say that's where the format began to run into some pushback.
SIEGEL: Well, is a 3-D movie something now that kids are coming to expect as part of the experience of going to the movies?
Mr. COHEN: Well, certainly if you look at the number of animated films and the percentage of animated films that are coming out in 3-D, I think we are educating a whole generation of young moviegoers that 3-D is what movies are supposed to look like. And those young moviegoers, as they mature, will not have any problem putting on glasses to watch a movie and will just take it for granted that that's how you watch a film is with - in 3-D.
SIEGEL: Now on to 3-D television sets. I've read that so far, sales were disappointing this past year.
Mr. COHEN: Well, remember that 3-D television sets are so far very much a niche product. They're at the upper end of the product range for everybody who makes them, and there's not a lot of content.
But what I'm also hearing is that within the content creators, the studios, the networks and the consumer electronics companies, the video distributors, there's an unprecedented joint effort to avoid the chicken-and-egg problem that has plagued things like color and HD in rollouts in the past, so that everybody's working together so that when you go to the store and buy a 3-D unit, you can have something to watch when you get home.
But at the moment, it's really not a mass product. On the other hand, no one expected it to be, really. I think that you're in a 10-year rollout, and you're in about year two now, maybe.
SIEGEL: Well, looking ahead, David, do people who keep track of 3-D figure that it is coming at us slowly but inevitably or that it's maybe a boom that's fizzled out a bit or that we can't tell yet?
Mr. COHEN: You know, it's a funny thing with 3-D. I've been in the Variety archives, which go back to 1905, looking at the early coverage of stereoscopic cinema, going back to the first 20 years of the 20th century. And at that time, everybody assumed it was coming any day now. And in fact, in the 1920s, people were skeptical about sound the way people are now skeptical about 3-D because it had been tried, and it had always failed.
Well, as soon as it was successful, that skepticism vanished, and we don't even remember it. I think with 3-D, we're at a similar phase. It had been tried a lot of times, it's always failed, and there's still a lot of skepticism around it.
But I think what you're going to see is a transition to 3-D similar to what happened with color, where the TV networks went all color. So what you have is this sort of symbiosis. You have TV going 3-D; you have movies going 3-D. As long as they're both going 3-D, that will continue.
If 3-D television fails, either because consumers lose interest or it proves to be dangerous for your health or for whatever reason, then you might see this 3-D boom fizzle out. Otherwise, I think it's not just a boom. I think it's a wave that's going to eventually become how movies are made. It will just become another tool for moviemakers.
SIEGEL: Well, David Cohen of Variety, thanks for talking with us here in 1-D.
Mr. COHEN: Thank you very much.
SIEGEL: That's David Cohen, who follows 3-D issues for Variety, where he's an editor.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Violence by militant Islamist groups against Christians in Egypt is not new. But there are unusual expressions of alarm over the most recent attack, a bomb killed more than two dozen people and injured nearly a hundred after a New Year's service in a Coptic Church in Alexandria.
The Coptic Church is the Egyptian Christian church. Copts account for about 10 percent of Egypt's population. The vast majority of Egyptians are Muslim.
Among the new worries are that it was possibly the work of a suicide bomber and that it may have been organized by al-Qaida.
Borzou Daragahi is a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He's based in Beirut and joins us now.
And first, Borzou, what's the latest on the investigation?
Mr. BORZOU DARAGAHI (Correspondent, Los Angeles Times): Well, Egyptian authorities pretty much admit that they - if you read between the lines - that they're kind of at a loss. They arrested 17 people yesterday and then let most of them go. According to information that we have, many of those arrested were people who had cars in that particular area or happen to be passing by.
They fear that the best evidence for who is behind this bomb may have been incinerated in the bomb itself, if it was, in fact, a suicide bomber. And that's another point that underscores the kind of lack of clues that they seem to have. They're still not even conclusive as to whether it was a suicide bomber or a car bomb at this point. It was apparently a very big explosion.
SIEGEL: And is there any evidence, beyond the suspicion of it having been possibly a suicide bomber, that links this to al-Qaida or to an inspiration from al-Qaida?
Mr. DARAGAHI: There's nothing more than circumstantial evidence. This is the kind of attack apparently designed to inflict maximum casualties that al-Qaida is known for. And also, just recently in Iraq, the al-Qaida branch in Iraq declared basically war on Egyptian Christian sites because of this - it's the strange story about these two wives of Coptic Christian priests who purportedly converted to Islam and then were purportedly locked up by the Coptic Church as punishment for converting.
No one is even sure if this story is true, but it seems to have gained currency in the Internet, and it has become an excuse to launch attacks on Christians in the Middle East.
SIEGEL: Yes. Not just in Egypt now, but before that, in Iraq. Are Christians a new front for Islamist militants in the region?
Mr. DARAGAHI: You know, increasingly, it does seem that way. And, you know, you had the Christmas Eve bombings in Nigeria, you've had these attacks, constant attacks, really, stepping up recently on Iraqi Christians in Mosul, in Baghdad. And there does seem to be this concerted campaign to target this very vulnerable, dwindling community that does not have a lot of political power, does not have a lot of ways of defending itself. And it's, you know, a rather treasured community for many in the Middle East. And it's being - it's considered a tragedy that this community is being whittled down.
SIEGEL: I saw that a very senior Muslim cleric in Egypt expressed condolences for this to the leader of the Coptic community. And there have been other condemnations of the attack from Islamist groups in the Middle East. Do those condolences count for much with the Christian communities?
Mr. DARAGAHI: I think that for some in the Christian community, they do count for something. But on the other hand, what many Christians in the Middle East complain about is that, you know, even in the officially sanctioned Muslim discourse in the mainstream of the religion and the culture in the Middle East, they're often, you know, depicted as dupes of the West, that they're privileged, that they're wealthier and so on, creating the soup in which this type of extremism can take shape.
SIEGEL: Borzou, thanks for talking to us once again.
Mr. DARAGAHI: It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's Borzou Daragahi, who is a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He spoke to us from Beirut in Lebanon.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
There is a bird mystery in Central Arkansas. Why did thousands of red-winged blackbirds fall from the sky just before midnight on New Year's Eve? The birds fell over a one square mile area in the town of Beebe.
George Badley is Arkansas' state veterinarian with the state Livestock and Poultry Commission lab. That's where they've been testing some of the bird carcasses. And he joins us now.
Welcome to the program.
Dr. GEORGE PAT BADLEY (Arkansas State Veterinarian, Arkansas Livestock and Poultry Commission): Thank you.
BLOCK: And, George Badley, what are you hearing about what happened in Beebe late Friday night?
Dr. BADLEY: Well, the preliminary report from the pathologist at our lab shows that all of the birds - the 17 that we did tests on - all had internal bleeding. And that seems to be the only problem that they had, which would mean that they had traumas of some sort.
BLOCK: And what would account for that, that kind of trauma that would lead to internal bleeding like that?
Dr. BADLEY: Well, I had given some TV interviews earlier, and we had a lot of thunderstorms going through that time, and I thought maybe they had got sucked into a thunderstorm. But I believe that I was wrong there, because at noon, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission got a report from an eyewitness in Beebe that there were a lot of birds perching in the trees in Beebe, a lot of the blackbirds, which they do. They perch in trees by big numbers.
BLOCK: They're roosting, right?
Dr. BADLEY: They're roosting. And apparently, they can't see well at night. So that kind of rules out the flying into the thunderstorm because they don't fly at night. And he said that there was - something made a loud noise like a cannon that went off several times, repeatedly, he said.
BLOCK: This was an eyewitness there in the town of Beebe who heard this noise?
Dr. BADLEY: That's - and he gave the report to the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. And he said after the cannon went off a few times, he went outside and he could hear the sounds of wings flying low, which would have been the blackbirds, and running into things, like tree limbs and trees and even houses. That explanation goes along with what Dr. Britt found on his necropsy on the 17 birds.
BLOCK: The internal bleeding that you're talking about.
Dr. BADLEY: Yeah. And the bleeding would best be from blunt force trauma.
BLOCK: Mm-hmm. Now, this was just before midnight on New Year's Eve. Do you think it could have been firework explosions that startled the birds?
Dr. BADLEY: Well, they do set off fireworks in Arkansas on New Year's Eve. They have cannons that make a lot of noise. I mean, they have a firework that is called a cannon. They shoot it up in there and it makes a horrible noise. So...
BLOCK: Mm-hmm.
Dr. BADLEY: They also have things like they have around airports that are made to scare birds. I don't know which it might have been. We're still doing tests on the bird to rule out any disease or poison or anything like that, but we expect those probably to be negative.
BLOCK: And it was very localized, right? A lot of birds in a very small area.
Dr. BADLEY: Yeah. So that doesn't sound like a disease process at all. The thing of them being scared and running into things is much more plausible.
BLOCK: Well, Dr. Badley, thanks for talking with us. Appreciate it.
Dr. BADLEY: You have a good day.
BLOCK: Okay.
Dr. BADLEY: And happy New Year.
BLOCK: You too. Bye-bye.
Dr. BADLEY: Bye.
BLOCK: That's Arkansas State Veterinarian George Badley, talking about the death of thousands of red-winged blackbirds in the town of Beebe.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Now to the case of one community college thats defying a trend. Because of serious budget shortfalls, many state universities are threatening to cut humanities programs, such as foreign languages or philosophy. Even some private universities are doing the same.
But a community college in Queens, the philosophy program is king, as NPR's Margot Adler reports.
MARGOT ADLER: LaGuardia Community College has no real campus. Classes take place in four former manufacturing buildings. There are 17,000 matriculated students, plus many thousands more who take non-degree programs. There's a well-regarded nursing school, engineering, veterinary technology.
But here's the surprise - 4,500 are taking philosophy. A hundred and fifty sections, seven full-time professors, most of them added in the last two years.
Peter Katopes is the interim president of LaGuardia. He says people tell me the role of community colleges is narrow: To train students for tomorrow's jobs.
Dr. PETER KATOPES (Interim President, LaGuardia Community College): What are these jobs?
ADLER: The real task, he says, is training students for what he calls the entrepreneurship of the imagination.
Dr. KATOPES: It's giving students the opportunity to really understand the context of their lives, and you do that through the humanities. If you do even a cursory survey of very successful CEOs, you will find that an unbelievable number of them did their undergraduate degrees in English or philosophy or history.
ADLER: All kinds of students are taking philosophy here. Liz Montesclaros is 29. She needed a job and, without thinking much about it, she joined the military.
Ms. LIZ MONTESCLAROS (Student): It's not the best place for questioning. Very rigid, very structured. When I finally got out, that's when I decided, hey, this is what I really wanted to do. I want to explore the questions that matter to me. What are we doing here? Why am I here in the first place, for what purpose?
ADLER: E.J. Lee is 22 and started out as a business major.
Ms. E.J. LEE (Student): My parents were, you know, growing up - make money, make money, make money. So I figured, you know, business was what you do. But as a business major, I was required to take an ethics course. And as soon as I sat in that class, I knew that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
ADLER: These are the kind of attitudes you might find normal at a four-year liberal arts college. But the students here speak 120 different languages. And most of them were not born in the United States.
Mr. GABRIEL LOCKWOOD (Student): We're all so different on the outside. And on the inside we're all searching, we're all seeking.
ADLER: Gabriel Lockwood is 36. He wandered through Europe, knows a half-dozen languages, worked as a translator, took courses at various European universities but couldn't get credit for them in the United States. So at 36, he's starting again. His full of questions and philosophy, he says, has helped to answer some of them.
The classes in philosophy are the usual. Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, Medical Ethics, Religion and Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Logic, Aesthetics, Eastern Philosophy, but also new courses being developed in African Philosophy and Latin Philosophy.
John Chaffee is the chair of the department, and says philosophy is a necessity, not a luxury.
Dr. JOHN CHAFFEE (Chairman, Philosophy Department, LaGuardia College): It's something which is really at the heart of life. It addresses the foundational questions that we all wrestle with. And these are questions that Viktor Frankl said burn under our fingernails.
Philosophy is a discipline that gives us the tools to really understand ourselves, and the skills to answer the mysteries that are really at the heart of ourselves and at the heart of life.
ADLER: Today, the Philosophy Club is meeting. More than a dozen students and two professors sit in a circle and debate happiness.
Professor Richard Brown asks, suppose you lived a totally pleasurable life...
Professor RICHARD BROWN (Humanities Department): But then you found out the day after that that youd been living in a virtual reality for your whole life and that you never actually done any of those things, but you had all the experience. You had all the pleasure. You had all the satisfaction. You had all the contentment. Would you say you were happy in those previous experiences?
ADLER: Arthur Rodriguez, Javier Velasco and Mohammad Bahi(ph) begin to argue.
Mr. ARTHUR RODRIGUEZ (Student Member, Philosophy Club): Even if this life is a dream, and then we wake up when we die and we accomplish nothing, you still can't take away the experience of that dream or what you thought you accomplished.
Mr. JAVIER VELASCO (Student Member, Philosophy Club): If you had no suffering, you can't really recognize happiness or appreciation for something if its always there.
Mr. MOHAMMAD BAHI (Student Member, Philosophy Club): It's like saying that, oh, you're not divorced, youre just married once. You really dont youre your wife. It's like, you dont have to.
(Soundbite of conversation)
Professor MINERVA AHUMADA (Humanities Department): They bring very different things to the mix.
ADLER: Minerva Ahmad teaches introduction to philosophy and Eastern philosophy.
Ms. AHMAD: It's more personal here, it is more challenging here, but also, the results that you get are way more surprising than what I got at other kind of institutions.
Professor RICHARD BROWN (Philosophy): Everyone's got problems, but our students have a lot of real serious, real-life issues.
ADLER: Philosophy professor Richard Brown.
Prof. BROWN: And then to suddenly see them become curious about, well, the nature of forms or universals or what's the morally right thing to do, it's really a privilege. These people never envisaged that theyd be studying these kinds of things and also understanding it and having it influence their life.
ADLER: Five years ago there wasn't even a philosophy major at La Guardia. Now, 60 students are majoring, and several I talked to said they want teach in the future. Liz Montesclaros(ph).
Ms. MONTESCLAROS: Im just struck by the passion of the people who are here, the faculty and the students.
ADLER: The president of La Guardia Community College made philosophy a priority. The department chair built a department and hired faculty. Now this community college in New York City that's under many people's radar has more philosophy majors than many four-year colleges and universities. Like that line in the film "Field of Dreams" - if you build it, they will come.
Margot Adler, NPR News, New York.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
South Africa has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. Roughly speaking, one out of every 300 people is behind bars. That has inspired a lot of prison outreach programs. In Cape Town, one of those programs is not only rehabilitating criminals, it's also producing some fine actors.
Anders Kelto has this report.
ANDERS KELTO: The Bonnytoun House is a juvenile detention center in the Cape Town suburb of Kenilworth. The cement courtyards and covered walkways make it feel more like a dilapidated old college quad than a prison - until you see the barbed wire and heavy steel bars.
Hundreds of boys pass through Bonnytoun each year, for everything from house break-in to drug abuse to murder. Most are here for just a few months, but some spend years following a routine of meals, classes and counseling. But recently, a new creative arts program has attracted a lot of attention.
Unidentified Man #1: Witching.
Unidentified Group: Witching.
Unidentified Man #1: Time.
Unidentified Group: Time.
Unidentified Man #1: Of night.
Unidentified Group: Of night.
Unidentified Man #1: 'Tis now the very witching time of night.
Unidentified Group: 'Tis now the very witching time of night.
KELTO: The Independent Theatre Movement of South Africa recently started a Shakespeare program here at Bonnytoun. It's a three-week crash course in speech and acting that ends with a staged performance right here inside the prison.
This particular group is working on "Hamlet." One of the boys, just 15, is here for two charges of robbery. South African law protects the identities of juvenile criminals, so his name cannot be given.
He sits in a small holding room, wearing a black Bonnytoun T-shirt and fidgets with his hands as he talks.
Unidentified Man #2: For this, it's actually a big thing for me, an opportunity to experience how to feel, how actors feel, and how to work with a real producer.
KELTO: Tauriq Jenkins is the creative director. He's 29, with a trademark director's goatee. He says many of the boys are quite talented.
Mr. TAURIQ JENKINS: Some of the best actors you'll ever find are the guys who sit in prison. In many cases, these gentlemen have a refined sense of how to read a situation, of how to read human nature.
KELTO: And he says acting allows them to express emotions they normally keep bottled up.
Mr. JENKINS: If you shed tears in a prison, you're picked on. You're bullied. And yet, the theater convention protects me from being humiliated.
Unidentified Man #3: (as Hamlet) Married with my uncle, my father's brother, within a month. It cannot come to good. But break my heart.
(Speaking foreign language)
KELTO: Dennis Baker has been a manager at Bonnytoun for 25 years. He's a sizable man in his 50s with short, curly gray hair. He says there was initially some skepticism over the Shakespeare program. But he's seen it help many of the inmates.
Mr. DENNIS BAKER (Manager, Bonnytoun House): A lot of them were timid, reticent, shy boys. Here, they were given the impression to become something else. It made a difference to how they felt about themselves. That was evident.
KELTO: He says the production even caused his staff to see the boys differently.
Mr. BAKER: You can almost see the light go on when they see that same boy with a tunic on, you know, pretending to be some kind of warrior, you know? And all are saying, hey, maybe this boy can change.
KELTO: Another inmate, 17 years old, is here for assault. He slouches in his chair, arms folded across a gray Bonnytoun sweater, and wears a beat-up pair of Chuck Taylors.
Unidentified Man #4: Actually, I thought I was going to be kicked out.
KELTO: Why did you think you were going to be kicked out?
Unidentified Man #4: Because I didn't know I was capable of doing this.
KELTO: Of acting?
Unidentified Man #4: Yeah.
KELTO: And you think you are?
Unidentified Man #4: Now I think I am. Yeah.
(Soundbite of chanting)
KELTO: The night before the performance, the cast receives some surprising news. Jenkins describes what happened.
Mr. JENKINS: I was looking for my Marcellus in the one scene, so the guys went to look for him and then came back and said no, he's jumped ship.
KELTO: Jumped ship meaning?
Mr. JENKINS: Yeah, he had escaped the facility.
KELTO: It was an ironic escape. The character he played was a guard. But the next day, the show went on as planned, in front of a crowd of about 75 people - mostly family, friends and fellow inmates.
It was a great performance. And the number of guards there to keep an eye on things more than made up for the missing one.
Unidentified Man #5: (as Horatio) Good night, good prince. May flight of angels sing you to your rest.
KELTO: For NPR News, I'm Anders Kelto in Cape Town, South Africa.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Finally this hour, we're going to hear about one of the most successful collaborations in the history of hip-hop. The Wu-Tang Clan featured nine different rappers when it debuted in 1993, and they are the focus today in our series on creative partnerships.
Joel Rose has their story.
JOEL ROSE: Theres a moment on the Wu-Tang Clans classic first album when the members are talking to an interviewer. And they compare themselves to the after-school cartoon "Voltron," in which five robot lions combine to form one invincible warrior.
Unidentified Man #1: It says (Unintelligible). Hes the backbone...
Unidentified Man #2: (Unintelligible) He's the head, let's put it that way. We form like Voltron, and GZA happens to be the head, you know what Im saying?
ROSE: Like Voltron, the voices of the Wu-Tang Clan seem to fit together seamlessly.
(Soundbite of music)
WU-TANG CLAN (Music Group): (Rapping) (Unintelligible).
Mr. SACHA JENKINS (Writer, Producer): There were so many different, diverse voices sort of coming at you at once, very aggressively. But at the same time, it was one voice.
ROSE: Sacha Jenkins is a writer and producer. In the early-1990s, he was the editor of a hip-hop fanzine called Ego Trip when a friend played him a tape of a tape of the first Wu-Tang single.
Mr. JENKINS: It didnt feel like a lot of guys. That sort of sensibility and that energy just spoke to the chemistry that these guys had and I believe the hunger that they had to sort of change their environment and change their situation.
(Soundbite of music)
WU-TANG CLAN: (Rapping) The Wu is too slammin' for these cult killer labels, (unintelligible). Now they money's gettin' stuck to the gum under the table. That's what you get when you (unintelligible).
ROSE: Most of the Wu-Tang Clans members grew up in Staten Island. Taking inspiration from martial arts movies, they named themselves after a fictional sect of Chinese swordsmen. And they adopted an ethic of loyalty to one another that was born out of necessity and experience.
Mitchell Diggs is the CEO of Wu-Tang Corporation. Hes also the brother Robert Diggs, better known as RZA, the clans producer.
Mr. MITCHELL DIGGS (Chief Executive Officer, Wu-Tang Corporation): Me and RZA, we came from a large family, 11 siblings. We was pretty much familiar and used to how to balance out that many people at one time.
ROSE: Both Diggs and his brother had been signed as rappers to major labels before assembling the Wu-Tang Clan, and both had put out solo records that flopped.
For the Wu-Tang to succeed, Diggs and RZA had to persuade the other rappers to put the group first, at least for a while. Mitchell Diggs says it wasnt easy.
Mr. DIGGS: The biggest thing was, how the hell do you feed nine people off of one deal? You know, we laughed about it. But it was something that we thought about. You know, we knew that we had to create solo careers.
ROSE: The Wu-Tang Clan signed with one record company but their contract made sure each member had the freedom to make his own solo records. That was good for morale and for business. When the Wu-Tang Clans first album sold a million copies, all of its MCs were able to cash in, including Lamont Hawkins, who performs as U-God. Hawkins says the Wu-Tang Clan did something together that none of its members could have done alone.
U-GOD (Rapper): We come from nothing. And we make something out of nothing. We was trying to create our own industry, our own brand, our own situation, know what Im saying? So its like an industry was being built inside an industry.
(Soundbite of music)
WU-TANG CLAN: (Rapping) (Unintelligible).
ROSE: The Wu-Tang Clan made millions of dollars selling clothing and video games. But success wasnt always sweet. Founding member Ol Dirty Bastard died of a drug overdose. The other rappers built careers as solo artists or branched out into acting and film scoring.
When the Wu-Tang Clan came back together to record, the arguments were inevitable. But Mitchell Diggs says the group found a way to resolve them.
Mr. DIGGS: When theres tension, and dudes are beefing, and there's whining, you know, we have sit-downs. We go through 50 songs and say, what you dont like? And then we tweak them. And if you still dont like it, then guess what? You're not on that (BEEP) song no more. Excuse my French for cursing, but get out the way. We like the way the song is, and leave it alone.
ROSE: Occasionally the Wu-Tangs internal disagreements have gone public, as they did during the making of the clans 2007 album, "8 Diagrams."
(Soundbite of music)
WU-TANG CLAN: (Rapper): (Unintelligible).
ROSE: Rapper Raekwon complained about RZAs atmospheric production style to an online journalist.
Mr. RAEKWON (Rapper): RZA is trying to create too much of a orchestra, piano. This is not the vibe I want. But its his vibe. Its his vibe. Its like, hes like, hes like a hip-hop hippie right now, you know what I mean?
ROSE: Raekwon is using other producers on a solo album thats due out later this year. RZA is not appearing on the Wu-Tang Clans current tour because hes in Asia directing a martial arts movie.
But his brother Mitchell Diggs says the Wu-Tang members generally do get along. And to make their partnership work, he insists they all share a single dressing room on the road.
Mr. DIGGS: If you cant get in the room, youre going to come on that stage unfocused. Youre not going to have the chemistry. Keep the friends and family out and give them the dressing room so they can meditate, stare at each other. Even if they got to argue for 10 minutes, get it off their chest. And when you hit that stage, you're one body.
ROSE: A partnership more like the Chinese swordsmen who inspired them than most people expected.
For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
When the 112th Congress convenes tomorrow, a new era in American politics will begin. President Obama says he wants to build on progress that was made during the productive lame-duck session at the end of last year. But the message from congressional Republicans is - not so fast.
NPR political correspondent Mara Liasson has this preview of what's to come, including fights over spending and regulation and an old fight revisited over health care.
MARA LIASSON: The two parties arrived back in Washington with two very different ideas of what the voters want. While the White House sees the lame-duck session as a model for what can be done when both sides work together, many Republicans say it's better to have deadlock than that kind of deal making.
Mr. ED ROGERS (Republican Strategist): No Tea Party or conservative Republican thinks the lame-duck offered a model of bipartisanship. That wing of the party tends to think this was a losing group giving the finger to the American people on the way out.
LIASSON: That's Republican strategist Ed Rogers, who thinks bipartisan compromise on anything is a long way away. In the short term, Republican House leaders have promised to investigate the administration, cut a whopping $100 billion from the current budget and next Wednesday they'll vote to repeal the president's health care law. That makes sense, says Rogers, even though much of the GOP agenda is unlikely to pass the Senate.
Mr. ROGERS: Rather than compromise instantly, let's go ahead and define the priorities and the initiatives of the Republican majority in the House and the Republican Party generally. And, yes, some of that will be symbolic, given the realities of divided government. But it's not useless.
LIASSON: The big question is how President Obama will respond. Does he dive into the details of short-term fights on spending or does he try to vault above them by focusing on longer-term challenges like education infrastructure, deficit reduction or tax reform?
Mr. GEOFF GARIN (Democratic Strategist): That's really the drama around all of this, is will the president go big as he seeks to define the agenda for 2011?
LIASSON: That's Democratic strategist Geoff Garin, who thinks the president needs to talk about larger things that will make or break the country's future.
Mr. GARIN: The true test for President Obama in 2011 is his ability to establish his presidential leadership as something that is bigger, more visionary and more unifying for the country than the kinds of debates the Republicans want to offer.
LIASSON: A visionary plan for economic growth and competitiveness, says Garin, could make the Republicans' bean-counting focus on spending cuts look small and their determination to repeal health care backward-looking.
And even though the health care law will be the subject of the opening battle this year, its passage actually marked the close of an important chapter in American political history, as Vice President Biden acknowledged last March, when the president signed the bill.
Vice President JOE BIDEN: A man named Barack Obama put the final girder in the framework for a social network in this country.
LIASSON: The final girder in the great liberal project - Biden knew what he was talking about. The health care bill will be the last great middle class entitlement, says Jim Kessler of the policy think-tank Third Way.
Mr. JIM KESSLER (Co-Founder, Third Way): With the passage of health care reform, the 80-year Democratic quest to build the best possible safety net is essentially over. And the Democratic Party has to shift from being a party primarily concerned with economic security and dividing up the pie to one that is primarily concerned with economic growth and expanding the pie. And the president has to lead that transition moving from security to growth. That is how you reclaim the center and appeal to the vast majority of people in this country who are concerned that America is slipping.
LIASSON: It seems this is the direction the president wants to go. In his Saturday radio address, he said he wants to do more than just keep the economic recovery going.
President BARACK OBAMA: It's time to make some serious decisions about how to keep our economy strong, growing and competitive in the long run. We have to look ahead not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years. Where will new innovations come from? How will we attract the companies of tomorrow to set up shop and create jobs in our communities? What will it take to get those jobs? What will it take to out-compete other countries around the world?
LIASSON: The White House wants to have a debate this year about the future of American competitiveness, not just the size of government. And the president's top adviser, David Axelrod, thinks they'll have a better chance to win that argument this year than they did in last year's fight over health care and stimulus.
Mr. DAVID AXELROD (Adviser, Obama Administration): It's going to be a little different in the next two years. We have a little bit more room to have dialogue with the American people about how we build this economy for the long run. And I'm looking forward to that.
And while we would have preferred to see Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the fact that there is a divided government means that we're going to share responsibility for governing, and everyone's going to be held accountable - both parties.
LIASSON: And that's the White House game plan for the beginning of 2011 - lay out a big vision in the State of the Union address and call the Republicans' bluff whenever they can. Chapter 2 of the Obama presidency begins tomorrow.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Im Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And Im Melissa Block.
Arizona is facing scrutiny about the way it educates students who dont speak, read or write English. Some teachers, researchers and the federal government say the state's policy is leaving thousands of children behind.
NPR's Claudio Sanchez has followed this issue for years and he has this report.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: There are 150,000 school children in Arizona who don't know English. They're labeled ELLs - English Language Learners.
Ms. APRIL FRALEY (Teacher, G. Frank Davidson Elementary School): Consonants diagraph are two letters - show me with your fingers - that make one sound.
SANCHEZ: Like these eight and nine year olds in April Fraley second grade class at G. Frank Davidson Elementary in west Phoenix.
Ms. FRALEY: Example of T-H is - thuh-thuh-thuh. Another example...
SANCHEZ: For four hours a day, these English Language Learners are drilled on vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. Up until the late-1990s, schools in Arizona relied on various approaches to teaching English Language Learners. Bilingual education was especially popular, although with mixed results, so it was banned in 2000.
In its place, the state mandated a highly prescriptive four-hour block called Structured English Immersion that some teachers today call inadequate.
Ms. DARLENE GALINDO (Teacher, G. Frank Davidson Elementary School): I think that the four-hour block really is limiting for teachers.
SANCHEZ: First grade ELL teacher Darlene Galindo.
Ms. GALINDO: I think that it's limiting for students. I don't necessarily agree with it. But...
SANCHEZ: It's the law.
Ms. GALINDO: Yeah.
SANCHEZ: As far as Galindo is concerned, it's a law meant to be broken.
Ms. GALINDO: Did you guys notice on your grass when it grew that you have some sprouts that are alfalfa and some that are rye?
(Soundbite of children)
SANCHEZ: On this particular morning, instead of drilling students on the rules and structure of language, Galindo's fidgety first-graders are totally immersed in alfalfa plants - their latest science experiment.
Ms. GALINDO: I feel that math and science are very important for language development. And, you know, the students are able to use it in context.
SANCHEZ: But if a state or an inspector of some sort came in here and saw what you were doing, you wouldnt get into trouble would you?
Ms. GALINDO: It depends.
SANCHEZ: Galindo says as long as her principal is okay with what she's doing, she's not worried.
Arturo Sanchez, her principal, doesn't like the state-mandated policy either, because he says it boils down to a separate curriculum for ELL students.
Mr. ARTURO SANCHEZ (Principal, G. Frank Davidson Elementary School): You're basically creating Mexican rooms.
SANCHEZ: At least that's how students see it, says Sanchez, a stigma.
Mr. SANCHEZ: I don't think it's an exaggeration. The majority of them are Hispanic. And the majority of them do not have English as their first language, so you can see that right away. The time that they have with dominant English speakers is very limited.
SANCHEZ: Sanchez says the isolation and watered-down curriculum are barriers to students' academic success.
Mr. SANCHEZ: And we were seeing that in the data. Even kids that were coming out of the system, that were now considered English proficient, they were going into classrooms with mainstream students and they weren't able to keep up.
SANCHEZ: That's why, Sanchez says, he has allowed teachers to circumvent the state's Structured English Immersion policy. No one really knows how many schools are defying the state-mandated policy. The state seems to be looking the other way, but it still expects kids to function in a regular classroom within one year.
Dr. EUGENE GARCIA (Vice President, Education Partnerships, Arizona State University): Can the children function in an English classroom? And the answer to that question is no.
SANCHEZ: Eugene Garcia is a former dean of education at Arizona State University. He says a fifth of Arizona's ELL students are so far behind, they have little or no chance of catching up to their English-speaking peers. If you spend four hours a day learning the structure of the English language, Garcia says you will learn some English.
Dr. GARCIA: What you're not picking up is how it is used in an academic context. That's what's lacking.
SANCHEZ: Garcia says teachers have a right to be frustrated. Arizona's ELL model is just too prescriptive, too rigid.
Mr. TOM HORNE (Former Superintendent of Public Instruction, Arizona Department of Education): There's an extent to which I agree.
SANCHEZ: Tom Horne is Arizona's former state superintendent of public instruction, who presided over most of the changes in the way schools deal with children who don't know English.
Mr. HORNE: I personally advocated allowing schools more flexibility if they could show good results.
SANCHEZ: Horne admits that he was never a huge fan of the four-hour block. Maybe kids would be better off without it, he says.
Mr. HORNE: If the numbers of kids are small, they'll tend to learn English from their contemporaries, so you don't need to give them a four-hour model. You just throw them in and they'll learn.
SANCHEZ: Still, Horne insists the Structured English Immersion program is not as bad as critics say. Nearly a third of ELL students last year tested out successfully, the highest percentage ever.
State officials admit they don't know how many students are struggling and forced to return to their ELL program. But the U.S. Education Department and even the Department of Justice have gotten so many complaints about it, they're conducting several investigations.
Horne, who is now Arizona's state attorney general, says the Structured English Immersion policy is the law and he's prepared to vigorously defend it.
Mr. HORNE: Even if it means I have to fight them in court.
SANCHEZ: Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
There will also be some new faces in the White House, and some that are not so new to Washington. Former Commerce Secretary William Daley has reportedly spoken with President Obama about a job in the West Wing. No decision has been announced yet, but Daley could end up replacing his fellow Chicagoan, Rahm Emanuel, as White House chief of staff.
NPR's Scott Horsley reports on what kind of signal that might send.
SCOTT HORSLEY: More than a year ago, William Daley wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post arguing Democrats need to steer a more moderate course to win back Independent voters. Otherwise, he wrote, the November midterms would be just the beginning of their losses.
Daley, who was commerce secretary under President Clinton, is on the board of a Washington think tank called Third Way, that advocates for centrist policies. Third Way president Jonathan Cowan thinks Daley would bring that same moderate mindset to a new job in the White House.
Mr. JONATHAN COWAN (President, Third Way): The signal that you'd be sending to the country is we're ready to win back over the center. The policy signal that you'd be sending to Congress is we're willing to work with you to advance a moderate bipartisan agenda.
HORSLEY: Cowan, says Daley, who now works as an investment banker, would also help to mend frayed ties between the White House and the business community. Liberals are not exactly eager to see a more pro-business tilt, nor another banker on the government's payroll.
But the president doesn't seem too worried about courting his liberal base. Consider Gene Sperling, one of the leading candidates to replace Larry Summers as a top economic adviser to the president. Sperling, like Daley, is a veteran of the Clinton administration and an advocate for free trade. He wrote a book arguing progressive goals could be served with market forces, reasoning he explained in 2006 talk at Google.
Mr. GENE SPERLING (Former Adviser, Clinton Administration): I thought there was a dearth of people who accepted the inevitability of globalization, the inevitability and power of markets, and yet who still believe there was a role for government to make sure that a rising tide was lifting all boats.
HORSLEY: Neither Sperling nor Daley would be likely to rock the boat the way an outsider would. Nor would they alter Mr. Obama's reputation, for better or worse, of relying on a few familiar aides. Sperling's already working in the Treasury Department as a counselor to Secretary Geithner. Daley was an economic adviser to Mr. Obama's presidential campaign and he helped run his transition team two years ago.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Actor and dancer Christopher Tierney loves to make audiences scream. But last month, his performance on Broadway turned from thrilling to terrifying. Tierney flies onstage as Spider Man in the production "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark." On December 20th, something went terribly wrong. He fell 30 feet. Tierney is the fourth performer to be hurt on the $65 million production and his accident has prompted criticism about safety and a lot of finger pointing.
Tierney leaves the rehab hospital today and he's made time to join us to talk about his accident. Welcome to the program.
Mr. CHRISTOPHER TIERNEY (Actor, Dancer): Hello.
NORRIS: Could you describe for us the injuries that you sustained in a 30-foot fall?
Mr. TIERNEY: Yeah. I broke four ribs, three of my vertebras. I fractured my skull. I fractured my right scapula and a radial fracture on my elbow.
NORRIS: What do you remember about the accident? What do you remember about that night?
Mr. TIERNEY: I remember pretty much everything. I do this pretend jump off the bridge, but I'm stopped by the tether. But this night it wasn't tethered to the back of the stage. So when I went for it, I actually did jump off the bridge. I remember while I'm falling in that split second to make a turn fast just so I wouldn't fall on my head. And I fell on my back.
NORRIS: Did the cable snap or were you not properly hooked up?
Mr. TIERNEY: The cable that I'm attached with has 9,000 pounds of tension pressure. So the cable definitely didn't snap. So, I was not tethered to the back of the stage.
NORRIS: What happened there?
Mr. TIERNEY: Human error. They didn't attach me well enough.
NORRIS: Now, we should explain something, Christopher. Another actor actually plays Spider Man, sings the role onstage, but you're the Spider Man who flies through the air.
Mr. TIERNEY: Yeah. I'm the suited Spider Man.
NORRIS: So, you know, in addition to this jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, what other kinds of acrobatics are you performing?
Mr. TIERNEY: I'm flying through the theater at around 40 miles an hour. I have a big fight with the Green Goblin right above the orchestra seats and all throughout the theater. And it's very, very high flying adventure stuff. It's very fun.
NORRIS: You sound wistful when you describe this.
Mr. TIERNEY: Oh, it's so much fun. First of all, it's a dream come true. The four-year-old version of myself's dream come true.
NORRIS: We're talking to Christopher Tierney. He was injured in the Broadway production "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark."
Christopher, you've avoided blaming any one person. You've been very gracious about this, avoiding any kind of finger pointing, but you're not, as we said, the first person to be injured. Four performers have been hurt in this production.
Mr. TIERNEY: Yeah.
NORRIS: What's going on here? Why so many injuries?
Mr. TIERNEY: There's been a lot of injuries, but it is a very, very athletic show. It's funny, when you hear about all these injuries that happen, I've worked with dance companies all over the world where people tear their ACLs in performances. My ex-girlfriend had five concussions with a dance company, legs coming out of hip sockets - major, major injuries that happen all the time. But because we are so closely followed and scrutinized with "Spider-Man," you hear about every detail, about everything.
I feel completely safe on the show with the crew. They are watching every angle of everything. We never would've even thought to look at the tether in the back. It was just assumed that it was always there.
NORRIS: The union, the Actors' Equity, has faced criticism, the production has faced criticism, OSHA is actually monitoring the production very carefully. You're saying those criticisms are unwarranted?
Mr. TIERNEY: I mean, no, I mean, I'm all game for them to raise questions and check out the safety precautions in the show. You know, Department of Labor saw every single stunt that we did. We couldn't do a single performance of these stunts until they gave the go ahead. But they gave the go ahead.
NORRIS: The show's in previews and it's scheduled to open officially in early February. It's been delayed. Will you be healed by then?
Mr. TIERNEY: Yes, February.
NORRIS: Do you plan to be a part of the production?
Mr. TIERNEY: I don't think that Ill be healed by then, but I do believe I'll be close.
NORRIS: Christopher, we wish you all the best in your recovery.
Mr. TIERNEY: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: That's Christopher Tierney. He performs as the flying Spider Man in the Broadway musical, and he insists he will fly again.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
What does Mark Zuckerberg want? The founder of Facebook, the world's youngest billionaire at age 26, Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2010, Zuckerberg now has a whopping new investment in Facebook, half a billion dollars from Goldman Sachs and a Russian investment firm.
So, what does that new money mean for the social networking giant? What's the future of Facebook? We're going to get some ideas now from David Kirkpatrick, who interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at length for his book, "The Facebook Effect." Welcome to the program.
Mr. DAVID KIRKPATRICK (Author, "The Facebook Effect"): Thanks. Good to be here, Melissa. Thank you.
BLOCK: And, David, this is not just half a billion dollars we're talking about, right? This also leverages a lot of money from other investors.
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: Right. It actually is a total of $2 billion that'll be coming almost all to Facebook as a result of what Goldman Sachs has just arranged. So it's a huge infusion of cash to what is still a relatively small company.
BLOCK: Now, you say relatively small, let's put that in context because Goldman Sachs has figured that Facebook is worth about $50 billion at this point. Where does that number come from and do you think it's real?
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: Well, it's based on projecting into the future all the businesses that Facebook is already successfully operating, and that includes selling ads to major advertisers. It includes its self-service ads, which small businesses buy, which is actually its single biggest revenue stream, and it includes its credits product. So just those businesses alone are projected to grow enough that Goldman's, you know, financial experts believed it will be very soon that a $50 billion valuation will be justified. And I'm sure they anticipate that Facebook will eventually be worth a lot more than that.
BLOCK: And you think that's realistic?
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: I don't see any reason why it should not be.
BLOCK: What does this new capital help Facebook do? Are there innovations, products, acquisitions, things that you think Facebook is hungering after?
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: Well, in fact, I think there's innovations, products and acquisitions.
BLOCK: All of the above.
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: All of the above. And people. That would be the fourth category. You know, there certainly will be necessary acquisitions. And, you know, basically Facebook is going more and more head to head with Google on many matters. Even Apple is a company that Facebook has a complex love-hate relationship with and might require it to spend money in order to stay abreast.
So, Facebook, which currently has no cash on hand just to do things, means it has to do battle competitively with the biggest players in technology and the Internet.
BLOCK: And, David, based on your conversations with Mark Zuckerberg, what's his vision of the future, the company that he wants Facebook to become? Because he told you it's not building just a company for him, he wants to build something that makes a really big change in the world. Those are his words.
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: Well, I think he's already doing that. But, you know, to answer the basic question you asked at the outset of this report, what he wants is for more people to use Facebook. He believes he is giving them a new way to, as he puts it, share and be more open and connected, which he thinks is a transformative social process that will make the world a better place.
BLOCK: What would some specifics be about things that Facebook might be doing in the future, a bigger, bolder Facebook, that it's not doing now?
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: Well, I could think of two really big ones. One is to deploy its currency which it calls credits in a more broad-ranging way. At the moment, Facebook credits are something that you buy with a credit card or Paypal, and then you spend inside the network that Facebook operates. Predominantly you're doing that on games today. So, Zynga, which is the biggest Facebook game company, lets you buy a new cow for Farmville or whatever, and in order to do that, you have to use Facebook credits.
Another big opportunity is search. Something they could directly compete with Google on and, you know, by bringing all the social data that they have and the information about what people like and don't like, there's a lot of things they can get you information about more effectively today than Google has. And, in fact, Facebook may end up making a lot more money than Google as a result.
BLOCK: I've been talking with David Kirkpatrick. His book is "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World." David, thanks so much.
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Not only can you update your Facebook status on your smartphone, you can also manage your bank account. But security experts warn that as more people bank by phone, more criminals can steal by phone.
Jacob Fenston has the story.
JACOB FENSTON: April Carson hasn't been inside a bank for five years. She says she can do everything she needs to on her mobile phone, wherever she is.
Ms. APRIL CARSON: On the Metro, commuting to and from work.
FENSTON: Today she's at a coffee shop. As she sips her cappuccino, she opens her bank's app on her iPhone and taps in the password.
Ms. CARSON: You know, that is one pain, like, minor pain - sometimes my fingers are too big and so I put in the wrong password.
FENSTON: She unfolds a check to deposit, holds up her phone...
(Soundbite of camera clicking)
FENSTON: Takes a photo, uploads the image to her bank.
Ms. CARSON: And, boom, you have $200 in your account.
FENSTON: About one in 10 U.S. households uses mobile banking now, according to market research firm Nielsen. Only a handful of banks let you make mobile deposits. But most offer some mobile features, even small mobile banks.
Ms. ALICE FRAZIER (Cardinal Bank): Now it's an expected service when people come to bank with us.
FENSTON: Alice Frazier with Cardinal Bank in Virginia. When her bank rolled out its mobile website, many customers were leery. Now, three years later, just under 10 percent use the mobile site to check balances or transfer funds. Frazier says it's just as safe as using your desktop PC.
Ms. FRAZIER: What you need to know is that no customer information is saved on the phone. It goes away when the transaction is complete.
FENSTON: But that's not always the case with the downloadable apps put out by banks, says mobile security expert Andrew Hoog.
Mr. ANDREW HOOG (Co-founder, viaForensics): When people, let's say, in my family and friends' groups say, well, should we use this mobile banking app on our cell phone? I'm fairly skeptical of it. I certainly don't do it.
FENSTON: Hoog runs a company called viaForensics. It recently tested six of the most popular banking apps for potential weaknesses and only one passed. Some, like Wells Fargo's Android app, stored critical information on the phone in plain text.
Mr. HOOG: We were able to come in and find your username. We were able to find your password. And we were able to find out all of the different information about your bank account, about who you were buying services from, who you were paying, what your mortgage was costing.
FENSTON: Wells Fargo and other banks responded quickly with fixes, but Hoog worries rapidly changing technology means developers put speed ahead of security. Inside the banking industry, security experts are less skeptical.
Mr. PAUL SMOCER (President, Financial Services Roundtable): I have begun to use mobile banking myself, yes.
FENSTON: Paul Smocer is in charge of technology at the banking trade group, Financial Services Roundtable.
Mr. SMOCER: We haven't seen a whole lot of malicious software yet. Part of that relates to the fact that there are so many different manufacturers and operating systems in the mobile world. But part of it, I think, is also due to the fact that this is a relatively new environment. And unfortunately, crime follows growth.
FENSTON: But, he says, new technology could eventually make banking by cell phone safer than banking online or at an ATM.
Mr. SMOCER: Facial biometrics is something that we're looking at as an industry.
FENSTON: That means using the cell phone's camera to verify who's trying to access an account. Cell phones of the future could also use fingerprints to check identity. In the meantime, Smocer has some simple advice for mobile bankers. Treat your phone like you would a credit card.
Mr. SMOCER: My phone is now much more than a phone. It is, you know, an enabled device that allows me to do financial transactions.
FENSTON: In other words, don't lose it.
For NPR News, I'm Jacob Fenston.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Getting into college is a very competitive business, and yesterday we heard about one school that's trying to ease the pressure on students by eliminating AP classes. That was the subject of some of your letters, and we'll get to those now.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Those advanced placement courses put college-level workloads on high school students. And we heard from Peter Gow, an administrator at Beaver Country Day School in Massachusetts.
Mr. PETER GOW (Administrator, Beaver Country Day School): I think that pressure to make sure that you had that trophy on your transcript was something that we felt wasn't necessarily that healthy for kids. It didn't seem appropriate to be playing into that.
BLOCK: Hey, don't blame the classes, writes Chris Harlan of Woodland Hills, California. He continues, getting rid of AP classes because some students are overtaxed is like getting rid of track and field because not everyone can run less than a four-minute mile or shutting down the basketball team because no one on it is headed to the NBA.
NORRIS: Well, last week we heard about your memories of bad holiday food. Lutefisk was on that list. Art professor John Anderson described it.
Mr. JOHN ANDERSON (Art Professor): Lutefisk is a dried whitefish soaked in lye, and as the song goes, oh lutefisk, it looks like glue and tastes like a shoe.
NORRIS: Well, MacArthur Eld of Parma, Idaho, wrote in defense. He says, hey, give lutefisk a break. It's good. You do have to acquire a taste for it, but the same holds for most any non-usual food, like broccoli. My family has enjoyed lutefisk soup for 40 years at its annual Christmas party.
BLOCK: There's a ringing endorsement for you. You can send your endorsements or criticisms. Go to npr.org and click on contact us at the bottom of the page.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
What if, through an accident, you lost your ability to express yourself in your native language and if all your communication depended on speaking and understanding a foreign tongue?
That is the scenario in a debut novel by the Chinese-American writer Ruiyan Xu. Alan Cheuse has this review of "The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai."
ALAN CHEUSE: Theres a kind of useful symmetry at the outset of Xus appealing first novel. At the beginning of the book, Li Jing, a Charlottesville-born Chinese stock trader, survives a gas explosion in a restaurant but because of trauma from the accident, he loses his ability to speak Chinese.
His old professor-father and his wife, Meiling, a book editor, are understandably distressed. Chinese has become to Li Jing, well, Greek to him. For example, he can hear the differences in tone that make meaning clear in Chinese but, as Xu writes, he finds it impossible to enunciate the four variations.
For him, its like hearing a piece of music and then looking down at the black and white keys of a piano, not knowing how each note corresponds to the identical-looking keys before you.
Wife and father make a plan with the local hospital to fly in Rosalyn Neal, an Oklahoma City doctor whos an expert in aphasia. Dr. Neal has her own problems, mainly having just suffered the explosion of her failed marriage, and the exotic sights and sounds of Shanghai only add to her confusion.
She works with Li Jing in English to help restore his Chinese, but the main thing that happens - they fall in love, with upsetting results for the family.
Novelist Ruiyan Xu writes in English, so she doesnt enunciate the four tonal variations of Chinese. The tone of her story about love in modern Shanghai seems just right.
BLOCK: The novel from Ruiyan Xu is called "The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
More now on what's coming up for immigration policy both at the federal level and in the states. And here to help us out is Fawn Johnson. She's a correspondent at the National Journal, and she has been covering these issues.
So glad you came in.
Ms. FAWN JOHNSON (Correspondent, National Journal): Happy to be here.
NORRIS: Now, how big a priority is immigration reform for the 112th Congress?
Ms. JOHNSON: Well, that depends on who you talk to. There are people like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For him, this is an incredibly important issue, but he has had very little luck in actually getting anything passed in the lame-duck session that happened just before the new year. He fell short of getting 60 votes for a small part of what he wants, which is to help legalize some students who have been in the country for a very long time. It's unlikely...
NORRIS: The DREAM Act.
Ms. JOHNSON: The DREAM Act. That's right. It's unlikely that they're going to be able to get much going forward in the Senate just because they have a smaller majority than they did before, and they still need 60 votes for almost anything.
In the House, it's a different story. The Republicans have taken over, and they are much more interested in enforcement-related issues involving immigration than on things like a path to citizenship. It's not the most important issue for Republicans, but it is a very important issue for the incoming chairman of the judiciary committee, Lamar Smith of Texas.
NORRIS: It's interesting because he said that before they get to legislation, he wants to take up oversight.
Ms. JOHNSON: Right.
NORRIS: You know, looking carefully at the E-verify program, looking at the Obama administration's decision to scale back worksite raids and things like that.
Ms. JOHNSON: That's right.
NORRIS: What will that mean?
Ms. JOHNSON: Lamar Smith has been critical of the administration for not being as strong as they could be in terms of enforcing immigration laws at the worksite. However, the administration has been countering and has been saying for the last couple of years that they actually have a higher deportation rate of criminal aliens than they have ever.
So you can expect a kind of tit for tat I think, you know, with Republicans pressing on things that they are interested in, and then the administration countering by talking about how they're enforcing immigration.
NORRIS: Now, the 2012 presidential election is like thunder in the distance.
Ms. JOHNSON: Exactly.
NORRIS: And lawmakers will certainly have that in mind. Is it possible that some Republicans, particularly in the House, will push for hawkish immigration policies to try to drum up support on the conservative side? Or is it - might they stay away from that for fear of repelling Hispanic voters?
Ms. JOHNSON: I think you will see a little of both. Certainly, there are members of the Republican Party, especially those who have been recently elected, who have been incredibly forceful about how strongly the immigration laws should be enforced.
But then there are also other members of the Republican Party who must answer to business interests, and the business community is not terribly interested in watching people crack down wholeheartedly on immigration. What they would like to see is something a little more moderate, which would involve things like increasing enforcement, but at the same time giving them access to the workers that they need.
NORRIS: Now you've written that inaction on the federal level has motivated state and local Republicans to get tough on illegal immigration. How many states are trying to push through laws much like the controversial one that Arizona passed last year?
Ms. JOHNSON: There are a handful of states that are going to make the attempt. There are a few that might actually succeed. South Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma are ones that we can expect to, probably within the next couple of months, have some sort of legislation that looks like the Arizona Enforcement Law.
The question is do they then invite a similar reaction from the federal government?
NORRIS: Meaning lawsuit.
Ms. JOHNSON: Right. Exactly. We have to see how the lawsuits that have been filed play through before we really figure out what's happening in the courts.
NORRIS: If states do take this up and pass a patchwork of laws, what does that mean if you - if that leads to something that you described this as much like a balkanization (unintelligible)...
Ms. JOHNSON: Exactly.
NORRIS: ...having all kinds of varying immigration policies all over the country.
Ms. JOHNSON: It's kind of chaos. Part of the reason why the 1986 big immigration bill that was passed under President Reagan made the immigration laws a purview of the federal government was precisely to avoid this type of situation.
And the reason why you're starting to see so much of this legislation pop up at the state and local level is because they're frustrated that Congress hasn't acted. So you could see quite a bit of chaos and real uncertainty on the part of businesses and on the part of immigrants, be they legal or illegal, about what exact rights that they might have in any particular community.
NORRIS: Fawn, before I let you go, I have one last question about federal immigration policy. Despite the polarization on this issue, is there room for compromise? Much like we saw in the case of the tax cuts, the compromise between the Obama administration and the Republicans, might we see something like that on this issue?
Ms. JOHNSON: If we're going to see any type of compromise, it'll probably be on something much smaller. I can envision, for example, some sort of compromise in which the business community agrees to verify the legal status of all the people that they hire in exchange for some sort of protections from the Department of Homeland Security or others that would come in and raid them for example. That's a possibility.
NORRIS: Fawn Johnson, thanks so much for coming in.
Ms. JOHNSON: My pleasure.
NORRIS: Fawn Johnson covers immigration issues for the National Journal.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This weekend, 10-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray found something that's 240 million years older than she is. The girl from the Canadian province of New Brunswick is the youngest person ever to discover a supernova, an exploding star.
Supernovas can briefly shine as brightly as an entire galaxy. Young Kathryn Gray shares credit for this discovery with amateur astronomers Dave Lane and her father Paul Gray. This is his seventh supernova discovery.
Mr. PAUL GRAY: There are friends of mine who have searched for supernovas, and they have searched close to 2,000, 3,000 hours. I thought I was lucky when I found my first one 15 years ago because we were only doing that for 56 hours when we caught our first one.
BLOCK: Now how many hours had it been for her?
Mr. GRAY: Fifteen minutes.
BLOCK: Fifteen minutes, wow.
Mr. GRAY: It might have been ten minutes.
BLOCK: Ten year old Kathryn Gray says she found the supernova using a computer program that compares nighttime images of the sky taken through a telescope.
Ms. KATHRYN AURORA GRAY: It takes two different pictures, an older picture and a newer picture that were tooken(ph) on New Year's Eve by my dad's friend. So I was looking at the images on the computer. I hit link, it's a little button, and I hit link, and it put the two pictures together.
And then you just look around the little galaxy there, like the little ball of light that's blinking.
BLOCK: So in other words, this computer program, if I have this right, is putting two images on top of each other, and if there's something there...
Ms. GRAY: If it's not there on all the pictures, then it starts to blink.
BLOCK: And that's what you're looking for, something blinking?
Ms. GRAY: Yes.
BLOCK: And what did you think when you saw this thing blinking at you?
Ms. GRAY: Well, I thought a good possibility. So I was kind of excited that I might have found one. But I didn't want to get my hopes too high in case it wasn't.
BLOCK: But it turned out that it was. It's been verified, right?
Ms. GRAY: Yeah.
BLOCK: And the supernova has a name now, right, 2010LT?
Ms. GRAY: 2010LT.
BLOCK: No way to get it named after you?
Ms. GRAY: No.
BLOCK: No. Is that disappointing at all?
Ms. GRAY: Yeah, they do it in alphabetical.
BLOCK: Do you stop and think, Kathryn, that this supernova is 240 million light-years away? Can you even imagine what that distance means?
Ms. GRAY: It's just so far away, you'd never be able to see it with only your eyes. You can probably barely see it with a telescope, too.
BLOCK: Do you think, Kathryn, that this is something you want to keep on doing, either for fun or maybe when you're grown up doing something with astronomy?
Ms. GRAY: Well, I'm just going to keep it as a hobby, I think.
BLOCK: What do you like about it?
Ms. GRAY: Oh, I like being able to look at the stars, and okay, there's the Big Dipper, and there's Venus, and it's cool to be able to point those things out that I know.
BLOCK: Do you have a favorite constellation?
Ms. GRAY: My favorite constellation is called Orion. He's an archer, I think.
BLOCK: An archer, yeah, he's a big one, a big, bright one.
Ms. GRAY: Yeah.
BLOCK: He's about one of the only ones I can ever find. So he's a good one for me, too.
Ms. GRAY: I like him. I always like looking at Orion.
BLOCK: Well, Kathryn, thanks so much for talking to us. Congratulations.
Ms. GRAY: Thank you.
BLOCK: That's 10-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray of Fredericton, New Brunswick, the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. It's in the constellation of Camelopardalis, in the galaxy UGC 3378, which is 240 million light-years away.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
It's a joy to be free again: Those words from 51-year-old Cornelius Dupree Jr. today after being officially exonerated in a Dallas courtroom.
Dupree spent 30 years wrongfully imprisoned in connection with a rape and robbery case. That means he served more time than any other Texas prisoner exonerated by DNA evidence. NPRs Wade Goodwyn reports.
WADE GOODWYN: For the last five years, the city of Dallas has watched a parade of men, nearly all them black, march out of the state prison system after decades of life wasted. Cornelius Dupree is the 21st just from Dallas. Thats more than all but two states.
Barry Scheck and his staff at The Innocence Project have been behind many of these exonerations, including Dupree, who sat next to Scheck in the car as they drove away.
Mr. BARRY SCHECK (The Innocence Project): So it's quite an extraordinary case, and it's a great tribute to Cornelius and his spirit that he was able to, you know, fight this long and this hard to win his freedom.
GOODWYN: Dallas has so many exonerations not because it was more egregiously unjust than other counties, but because unlike other jurisdictions, Dallas County kept the DNA evidence refrigerated and stored for decades. Thats whats saved these men.
What convicted them was erroneous eyewitness testimony. Out of the 21 men whove been exonerated in Dallas, 20 were convicted on the strength of the victims wrong, as it turns out, identification.
That in turn has pointed the finger at the police and prosecutors, who are now themselves accused of pushing rape victims to make cases. Barry Scheck says thats what happened in Duprees case, too.
Mr. SCHECK: The kinds of eyewitness procedures that were used in his case were ridiculous, and they're the reason that he was wrongfully convicted.
GOODWYN: Another one of the reasons these exonerations are happening in Dallas is because Dallas elected Craig Watkins, Texass first black district attorney.
Before becoming DA, Watkins was a defense attorney who says he saw firsthand how the county sometimes railroaded poor black men. Watkins' willingness to work with the Innocence Project to has not made him popular with many of his colleagues and some lawmakers in Austin.
Mr. CRAIG WATKINS (District Attorney, Dallas County, Texas): Its been proven that the system needs to be fixed, and we know, actually, where we can fix it. How about those people that are in positions of power and influence getting on board?
GOODWYN: For many of these men the anger was taken out of them long ago. Thirty of years of telling people youre innocent to no avail affects a man.
Cornelius Dupree wasnt let out of Texas prison because he was innocent; he was finally paroled after serving 30 years in July. Dupree says hes not angry, but he does harbor some resentment.
Mr. CORNELIUS DUPREE: But I do have some ill feelings, you know, in terms of the way the system went. You know, I had - it took so long to finally bring this to light. You know, it was so many losses, thats what hurts me the most.
GOODWYN: Cornelius Dupree says he just wants to live quietly now and try to enjoy his life.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
John Wheeler was a defense consultant, a former top official in the Air Force, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran who worked hard to get the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall built on the National Mall here in Washington.
On Friday, John Wheeler's body was discovered in a landfill in Delaware. Authorities are investigating the homicide. The writer James Fallows was a long-time friend of John Wheeler, and he joins me now to talk about his life and his work.
Jim, I'm sorry to hear about your loss.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (Writer, The Atlantic Monthly): I certainly extend my wishes to John Wheeler's family, but I'm glad to have a chance to talk about his life and achievements.
BLOCK: How did you come to know John Wheeler? This was back in the early 1980s.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes, in 1981, I published a book called "National Defense," and one of its themes was how, in the long run, in both technological and budgetary and also civic ways, the United States could prepare for its national defense after the real disasters and strains of the Vietnam War.
And John Wheeler read the book and got in touch with me, and one of his great themes through his adult life was the aftereffects of Vietnam and alleviating them for the military and for the whole, you know, civic society, too.
So we started talking about those themes then and really did over the next 30 years.
BLOCK: John Wheeler, as we mentioned, graduated from West Point, class of 1966, went to Harvard Business School and then to Vietnam, served, as I understand it, 12 months but not in combat.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. And this distinction may seem minor to those of us who were either not in the military or not in Vietnam, but within the community of soldiers, the fact that John Wheeler, who came from a long line of career and distinguished soldiers and went to West Point, was in the military but not in combat was a point, sometimes, of friction between him and others who had been combat veterans at that time.
BLOCK: What did John Wheeler tell you over the years about the legacy of the Vietnam War, how it affected all the work that he did afterward?
Mr. FALLOWS: The main continuity in my contact with John Wheeler over 30 years was his concern about appropriate respect for people who had served in uniform and their families and those who had suffered loss for the nation's defense.
And again, even though he had not himself been in combat, he had a lot of friends from his West Point class who had died in Vietnam or been injured there, and he made it his cause in the decades after that to empathize with people in the subsequent wars.
And so I think the main issue that I think he would like to be remembered for is finding appropriate civic respect for the people who sacrifice in the name of America's defense and liberty.
BLOCK: I'm curious about John Wheeler as a man. You describe him in a post on your blog, Jim, as a complicated man, very intense and sometimes changeable friendships, passions and causes.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. And I've been corresponding in the last day or two with a lot of people who knew him at different stages in his life: at West Point, in Vietnam, at the Harvard Business School, when he was head of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, et cetera. And I think everybody had a sense of on the one hand, he looked like a very sort of buttoned-up and respectable lawyer-type person, and he was, in fact, a graduate of the Yale Law School and once worked for the Securities and Exchange Commission. But he could be very emotional.
And the standard discussion I would have with John Wheeler, either in person or on the phone or over email, was his arguing a point to what I considered about 50 percent beyond a reasonable conclusion and my saying, well, yeah, but what about X and Y and Z? And he'd say okay. And then we'd back it down to what I thought was a more reasonable point of agreement.
But for somebody who was as professionally accomplished, he also was a very passionate, almost heart-on-his-sleeve person. This made him some loyal friends. It also caused him some enemies because he said things that were probably not fully prudent, but it made people think that he threw himself entirely into the whole range of things that he did.
BLOCK: James Fallows, thank you very much.
Mr. FALLOWS: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: James Fallows is national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. He also appears regularly on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED on the weekends. We were talking about defense consultant John Wheeler, whose body was found in a Delaware landfill on Friday.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
In Pakistan today, the governor of the most populist province, Punjab, was shot to death apparently by one of his bodyguards. This is the highest profile assassination since the slaying of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto three years ago, and it has shaken an already fragile government.
Governor Salman Taseer was outspoken on issues ranging from women's rights to secularism, and he took a very public stance against Pakistan's blasphemy laws.
Our correspondent in Pakistan, NPR's Julie McCarthy, recently interviewed the governor. She happens to be in the U.S. right now, and she joins us for more on the death of Taseer.
Julie, good to talk to you.
JULIE McCARTHY: Thank you, Michele. Good to talk to you.
NORRIS: Now, people who've interrogated the governor's bodyguard say he actually bragged about the killing and that he was angry about the governor's effort to overturn the blasphemy laws. Tell us why Governor Taseer would want to do that?
McCARTHY: Well, he wants to do that because he was a secular voice in Pakistan. He was a very vocal one, which has through the years drawn the ire of the more fundamentalist forces in Pakistan. They are gaining strength in the country and have effectively shut down moderate voices like Taseer's.
He believed, as well as other rights groups did, that the country's blasphemy laws, which are among the toughest in the Muslim world, were outdated. The laws were introduced in the 1980s by the dictator Zia-ul-Haq who used them to consolidate his power, strengthen the religious radicals. Over a thousand people have been convicted under them.
But to date, no one has actually been executed under the laws, although plenty of people have received the death penalty under them.
NORRIS: Well, Julie, the blasphemy law and the - and one particular blasphemy case has been in the news recently in Pakistan. Can you tell us more about that case?
McCARTHY: Yeah. This is a real hot-button issue here right now in Pakistan. Asia Bibi is a Christian woman. She's a mother, she's a farm worker. She was convicted for having blasphemed the Prophet Muhammad, which carries the death sentence.
There have been in recent years, Michele, an increase in violence against this very tiny, small Christian community in Pakistan. And groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say the blasphemy laws are an easy tool to attack the Christians.
NORRIS: Did you have a chance to talk to Governor Taseer about this case?
McCARTHY: I did. And he was very vocal about it. He was called, in fact, by his mourners today, courageous for the stand he had taken on it. He was out ahead of this before anybody. He took it to the president and said this woman ought to be pardoned.
And we talked to him in late November, and I asked him why not wait for the courts to complete the appeal process before you seek a pardon in the case of Asia Bibi? And he said, you know, that's just going to condemn her even more.
And here's what he said.
Governor SALMAN TASEER (Punjab Province): Some people have said, oh, let the law take its course. Well, the law can take its course in five years, you know, and then what is going to happen to this poor woman? So therefore, I came in. And by doing that, I think it set a whole chain of events in motion.
And the sad part is that they actually threaten people and say that, you know, we'll kill this person and we'll kill that person and, you know, say you are not a Muslim and so-and-so is a Muslim. Now, you know, frankly, it's for God to decide whether I'm a Muslim or not.
McCARTHY: The Pakistan government is not inclined to push for a reform of that blasphemy law now, and Asia herself still languishes in jail.
NORRIS: Now, the governor, as I understand, also warned against appeasing Islamist militants in Pakistan.
McCARTHY: His home province of Punjab had been called a breeder reactor for extremism. And Taseer had been highly critical of those in the provincial government, who, in his estimation, were soft on convictions, on charges - on a whole tone against the militants.
Here's what he said about the treatment that ought to be meted out against those suspected and convicted of engaging in terrorism in Pakistan.
Gov. TASEER: That they get known if they're caught. They're - either they're in jail in a hole in the ground. When I was arrested by General Zia-ul-Haq, I was chained to the ground for three months - on the ground. These people should be treated in the same way. They're murderers. I was a political prisoner. I mean, what are you doing? Why are you mollycoddling them? Somewhere, the buck stops, you know?
NORRIS: Before Governor Taseer was gunned down by his bodyguard, did he acknowledge that his life was in danger?
McCARTHY: Oh, very much so. He was very aware that he had become a target, and very aware that those who spoke out, spoke out at risk of their lives.
NORRIS: Thank you, Julie.
McCARTHY: Thank you.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Julie McCarthy.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The death of a Palestinian demonstrator over the weekend has focused attention on how Israel deals with a burgeoning protest movement that includes Jews, as well as Arabs. Palestinians say the protester died from inhaling tear gas that was fired by Israeli troops during a demonstration in the West Bank. The Israeli military disputes the Palestinian version.
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: The small concrete house is packed with women in mourning, sitting in plastic chairs. People file in and kiss cheeks, offering condolences.
Soubhiya Abu Rahmah is a stout woman dressed in a traditional Palestinian robe embroidered with cross stitching. Her son was killed here in the West Bank village of Bil'in during a demonstration in 2009. His face appears in posters papering the otherwise bare walls.
Now, her daughter, Jawaher Abu Rahmah, has also died after attending a similar demonstration last Friday.
Ms. SOUBHIYA ABU RAHMAH: (Through Translator) My daughter started talking to me screaming and saying, I feel bad. I feel bad. Then she started throwing up, throwing up. We took her to the hospital and we found that the tear gas had gone totally into her lungs.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Soubhiya blames the Israeli military for her death. Palestinian doctors support that claim, saying she died of a heart attack after breathing in too much gas. There is an investigation, but Israeli press reports say that the military believes that she died due to other factors.
Unnamed Israeli officers are quoted as saying that the Palestinians are trying to use the young woman's death to discredit the Israeli army. There will be a debate about the incident tomorrow in Israel's Parliament. The IDF declined to go on the record about the investigation.
Right-wing parliament member Danny Danon belongs to the security committee. Speaking to NPR by phone, he says the Palestinians are cynically trying to manipulate the case.
Mr. DANNY DANON (Member, Knesset): But what you will see today is that they think that by bullying us in the international arena, we will make more concessions, and that is not the case, especially not with this government.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He says, in fact, Israel encourages peaceful protesting.
Mr. DANON: I don't know any other neighbor of Israel that you can go and protest. But when the demonstration becomes an assault, and it happens sometimes in the West Bank, that's when we have to take action. And when our soldiers are under threat, they have to protect themselves.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But human rights groups and activists say a series of recent cases shows that Israel is systematically cracking down on dissent.
Mr. JONATHAN POLLACK (Pro-Palestinian Activist): My case is only one of many cases, one that gets attention because I'm a Jewish Israeli.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jonathan Pollack is one of the leading pro-Palestinian activists in Israel. In 2008, he was participating in a peaceful bicycle protest in Tel Aviv when he was arrested, the only person arrested during the demonstration. Last month, he was convicted of disturbing the peace and was sentenced to three months in prison.
He says Israel is targeting protest leaders who challenge the occupation of the West Bank, while rabbis who break the law by preaching discrimination are unsanctioned.
Mr. POLLACK: I think that I can be sent to jail for three months for protesting the siege of Gaza, while open racism is advocated in Israeli society unanswered.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Another case that is garnering attention is that of grassroots organizer Adnan Ghaith who is from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Using an arcane law that dates back to the British mandate before the birth of Israel, Ghaith was told he was to be banished from his home for a period of several months on the basis of secret evidence that his defense lawyer was not allowed to see. He told NPR he won't obey the deportation order.
Jonathan Pollack says protest movements are a vital outlet for the many tensions here.
Mr. POLLACK: I do think that popular resistance and grassroots organizing are one of the only alternatives to horrible violence in this region. And I think that it is in the interest of everyone that this sort of resistance prevails.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: He warns that if Israel is allowed to repress the movement of civil resistance, there is no doubt that other more brutal forms of resistance will arise.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro NPR News, Jerusalem.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It's a saxophone solo you'd recognize anywhere.
(Soundbite of song, "Baker Street")
NORRIS: But you might not remember the name of the man who sang that familiar '70s ballad.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Scottish musician Gerry Rafferty died today at the age of 63. "Baker Street" was one of Rafferty's greatest hits.
NORRIS: It was released in 1978 on his solo album "City to City" and reached number two on the U.S. charts.
(Soundbite of song, "Baker Street")
Mr. GERRY RAFFERTY (Musician): (Singing) Well, another crazy day. You'll drink the night away and forget about everything.
BLOCK: Rafferty's lyrics were often painfully honest. In its obituary today, the Guardian wrote that Rafferty's mother dragged young Gerry round the streets on Saturday nights so that they would not be at home when his father came back drunk. And Rafferty had his own struggles with alcohol.
NORRIS: But just as honestly as Rafferty wrote about hard living, he sang about hard loving, as in this song, "Right Down the Line."
(Soundbite of song, "Right Down the Line")
Mr. RAFFERTY: (Singing) You know I need your love. You got that hold over me. As long as I got your love, you know that I'll never leave. When I wanted you to share my life, I had no doubt in my mind. And it's been you, woman, right down the line.
BLOCK: And if those two songs don't stir up old memories for you, this one just might do it.
(Soundbite of song, "Stuck in the Middle With You")
Mr. RAFFERTY: (Singing) Well, I don't know why I came here tonight. I got a feeling that something ain't right.
BLOCK: That's Rafferty's 1972 hit with his band Stealers Wheel, "Stuck in the Middle With You." Twenty years later, Quentin Tarantino used the track in his film "Reservoir Dogs."
(Soundbite of song, "Stuck in the Middle With You")
Mr. RAFFERTY: (Singing) Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with you. Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you.
NORRIS: Singer-songwriter Gerry Rafferty. He died today. He was 63 years old.
(Soundbite of song, "Stuck in the Middle With You")
Mr. RAFFERTY: (Singing) It's so hard to keep this smile from my face. Losing control, yeah, I'm all over the place. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
I'm Melissa Block.
And, Michele, you've been off for a while on a book tour. It's great to have you back here in the studio.
NORRIS: It is great to be back.
BLOCK: And to begin this hour, we are going to talk about immigration: what's going on at the border, and what's likely or unlikely to happen on Capitol Hill. The new Republican leadership in the House has promised an even harder line against illegal immigration. More about Congress in a few minutes.
First, NPR's Ted Robbins tells us about current immigration policies.
TED ROBBINS: One word sums up U.S. policy toward illegal immigration: enforcement.
Ms. DORIS MEISSNER (Former Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service): We're absolutely in enforcement only.
ROBBINS: Doris Meissner is the former head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She's now with the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. Some politicians paint the southern border as lawless and out of control. But Meissner says the numbers don't support that conclusion.
Ms. MEISSNER: The trend is that enforcement is making a difference.
ROBBINS: Numbers from the Department of Homeland Security show a drop in apprehensions along the border from more than a million five years ago to less than half a million last fiscal year. Fewer people are crossing because there are fewer jobs available, but the trend began a decade ago, long before the recession began.
Deputy Customs and Border Protection Commissioner David Aguilar.
Mr. DAVID AGUILAR (Deputy Commissioner, Customs and Border Protection): This has been something that took hold when we started resourcing the borders, adding the infrastructure that was required, the technology, and that drop has continued.
ROBBINS: Enforcement away from the border has also picked up. The government removed about 400,000 illegal immigrants from inside the U.S. last year - a small increase.
The biggest shift was a decision made two years ago to go after what the government calls criminal aliens: illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in the U.S. They now make up half of all illegal immigrants removed.
Interior enforcement resources, though, are still small compared with border enforcement, and there's still one place left where relatively large numbers of people cross the border illegally - Arizona.
Mr. AGUILAR: But even those numbers, Ted, compared to what we used to see, are fairly low.
ROBBINS: Two hundred nineteen thousand apprehensions last year in Arizona - less than half the number a decade ago. And despite high-profile incidents like the killing of a Border Patrol agent last month and a southern Arizona rancher last March, the FBI reports that overall violent crime in southern border states is way down from a few years ago.
Yet, as Doris Meissner points out:
Ms. MEISSNER: The concerns and the antipathy is at an absolute high point.
ROBBINS: It's not about the numbers, Meissner says. It's about the real and perceived impact immigrants are having on the country.
Ms. MEISSNER: And underneath it all the kind of cultural issues of how much immigration is changing us, what it means to the identity of communities.
ROBBINS: Take Arizona. State Representative John Kavanagh is targeting illegal immigrants who have children in the U.S. He wants to change the way the Constitution grants those children citizenship.
State Representative JOHN KAVANAGH (Republican, Arizona): We believe that the current policy of giving citizenship based on your GPS presence in the U.S. at birth is a bad interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
ROBBINS: Kavanagh and legislators from 13 other states will announce a plan tomorrow they hope will result in the Supreme Court reviewing the way birthright citizenship is applied.
Ted Robbins, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
When we invited Lori Gottlieb to choose a book for our series You Must Read This, her choice seemed pretty dark. Lori says she had the same reaction at first.
Ms. LORI GOTTLIEB: I have to admit, the last thing I wanted to do was read "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination." Sure, it seemed like every critic in the country had raved about this book. But a memoir about a stillborn child? No, thanks.
But then, a few months later, I noticed a colleague reading at work and laughing out loud. I asked what was so funny, and she held up McCracken's memoir. So I picked it up, read it cover to cover, and then, because I was so awed by this book, I went a little crazy.
I don't mean crazy as in the book sent me over the edge, but crazy in terms of telling every single person that they absolutely, positively, without a doubt needed to read it too.
Don't for a second think that this book is just about a stillborn child. It's brilliantly funny and devastatingly painful. There's something life-changing about this book not only because it makes you grateful for your existence, but also because it makes you completely re-think it.
Meanwhile, McCracken is so engaging that you'll wish you could go to her house and eat dinner with her and her husband. Both writers, they'd spent McCracken's otherwise idyllic pregnancy in France, and when told that they had to name their dead baby on the birth certificate for legal reasons, they couldn't bear to give this child a name other than what they'd always called him in utero: Pudding.
I'm glad we were in a foreign country, she writes. The French probably thought it was an ordinary Anglo-Saxon name, like William or George.
I should mention that this book is different from your typical illness memoir tempered with gallows humor, because the authors of those books always, obviously, have a happy ending. But here, there's never a resolution because, as McCracken puts it, lighter things will happen to you, birds will steal your husband's sandwich on the beach, and your child will still be dead.
It's that uncomfortable truth that makes it so hard for people to comfort McCracken after Pudding's death.
I don't even know what I would have wanted someone to say, McCracken explains. Not: It will be better. Not: You don't think you'll live through this, but you will. Maybe: Tomorrow, you will spontaneously combust. That might have comforted me.
McCracken's pain is tolerable partly because we learn in the first few pages that there's a second baby - a healthy one - on the author's lap as she types the words into the memoir of her first. But during her second pregnancy, when she visits her obstetrician, she's no longer in that maternal oblivion that she worries may have killed Pudding.
Now, she explains, I wanted a separate waiting room for people like me, with different magazines. No Parenting or Wondertime or Pregnancy. I wanted Hold Your Horses Magazine. Don't Count Your Chickens for Women. Pregnant for The Time Being Monthly.
Happily, in her early 40s, she's able to have two healthy children about a year apart, the good old-fashioned way. And that's the thing - how do you reconcile her incredible good fortune with the fact that when people ask how many kids she still has, she still isn't sure if the answer is two or three?
It's hard to recommend a book like this without sounding slightly insane. All I can say is this story of loss and grief is really a moving and affirming story of love - for Pudding, for her husband and for the two children that follow - that, like Joan Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking," will pop into your head when you least expect it. Because despite the fact that it preys upon our deepest fears, that's not a reason to avoid it. It's actually the reason to read it.
NORRIS: The book is called "An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination" by Elizabeth McCracken, and we heard about it there from Lori Gottlieb. She's the author of "Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough."
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
There's a settlement in a landmark legal case involving the Labor Department and the coal mine giant Massey Energy. The case�involves Massey's Freedom Mine number one in Pike County, Kentucky. The Labor Department considers the mine too dangerous to operate without federal court supervision and it sought a federal court injunction against the mine. But today, Massey Energy agreed to unprecedented oversight.
And our correspondent, Howard Berkes, has been following the case as part of an ongoing NPR News investigation.
HOWARD BERKES: The Freedom mine amassed hundreds of safety violations, citations and fines for dangerous rock falls, for too much explosive coal dust, for failure to conduct safety inspections. It's a long list. Massey Energy continued to claim it put safety first at Freedom and its other mines, even after an April explosion killed 29 Massey miners at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia.
That disaster prompted the Labor Department to do something it had never done before - drag a coal mine company into federal court to force attention to safety. Freedom was the test case.
Mr. ED CLAIR (Retired Lawyer, Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration): I think that the settlement agreement is everything that the government could have hoped to achieve through the court action.
BERKES: Ed Clair is a retired lawyer for the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration and he finds the settlement remarkable.
Mr. CLAIR: It gives them incredible enforcement powers that they didn't have prior to this agreement.
BERKES: That includes federal court jurisdiction over the mine with contempt citations possible if Massey Energy fails to make the mines safe. The mine's most senior managers must be directly involved in safety procedures and are personally responsible for violations. Miners continue to have paychecks and jobs if all or parts of the mine are shut down while safety problems are fixed. And shutdowns and fixes are immediate when unsafe conditions are spotted.
Patricia Smith is the solicitor of the Labor Department.
Ms. PATRICIA SMITH (Solicitor, Labor Department): Almost all of the provisions in this order impose requirements upon Massey that are above and beyond the normal requirements of the law. We got really serious requirements that we wouldn't have had under an administrative proceeding and really nothing less than we would've asked the court for.
BERKES: Massey Energy may have agreed to all that because it is already in the process of closing the mine for good. The settlement is supposed to protect the 60 or so mine workers who will spend the next several months dismantling and removing equipment.
Massey officials did not agree to be interviewed, but said in a written statement that they're pleased to have the matter resolved and felt the best course of action was to cooperate with the government. Mine safety advocates say the settlement shows that going to court works.
Wes Addington directs the Appalachian Citizens' Law Center in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Mr. WES ADDINGTON (Director, Appalachian Citizens' Law Center): It's shown now that they're entitled to go into federal court and seek immediate relief for miners that are in immediate danger, and they should use this. They should use it going forward to protect miners in a more immediate way.
BERKES: Labor Department solicitor Smith said today more cases are possible. The settlement came just as the Freedom mine trial was set to begin. Court documents indicate Massey's production practices would've been on trial and compared with the company's persistent claims about safety. But mine safety advocates say that day is coming, given the ongoing investigations into the Upper Big Branch disaster and problematic safety records at some of Massey's other mines.
Howard Berkes, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The Philadelphia History Museum has been closed for two years for a multimillion-dollar renovation. When it reopens later this year, it will display thousands of objects, from fine arts to firearms.
But more than 2,000 items from the collection will be notably missing. The museum sold them to help pay for the renovation, and as Joel Rose reports, that has revived a debate about museum ethics.
JOEL ROSE: The Philadelphia History Museum is rich in artifacts. But its historic, 19th-century building had been falling apart for years.
Ms. VIKI SAND (Former Director, Philadelphia History Museum): It does no good to conserve an individual object if you put it back into the very environment that caused it to deteriorate in the first place.
ROSE: Former director Viki Sand says the museum lacked even the basics, like adequate lighting and modern climate-control systems. She says that will no longer be a problem after the Philadelphia History Museum's $6 million dollar renovation.
Ms. SAND: And so while the amount of money is not insignificant, clearly, it also gives the museum the opportunity to, in a new way for this city, be a compelling city history museum.
ROSE: What's brought the Philadelphia History Museum lots of attention isn't so much the renovation itself as how it was partly financed. Over the past seven years, what used to be called the Atwater Kent Museum quietly sold some 2,600 items from its collection. In the museum world, that's known as de-accessioning. And it's a very loaded word.
Mr. RUSSELL LEWIS (Chief Historian, Chicago History Museum): It can be a slippery slope. So I think you have to be extremely careful.
ROSE: Russell Lewis is chief historian at the Chicago History Museum. Lewis says his institution tries to avoid de-accessioning because of the message it can send to potential donors.
Mr. LEWIS: Why wouldn't somebody say, why should I give this to you? What guarantee do I have that you're not going to sell this tomorrow?
ROSE: This is why art museums have very strict rules about what they can do with the proceeds from de-accessioning. The Association of Art Museum Directors says you can only use those funds to acquire more art, period. But the American Association for State and Local History takes a more nuanced position. Terry Davis is its president.
Ms. TERRY DAVIS (President, American Association for State and Local History): As long as de-accessioning is done according to institutional policies that have been set ahead of time, for the long-term goal of taking care of collections, it's a perfectly fine practice to do.
ROSE: And that's exactly what the Philadelphia History Museum says it did. Former director Viki Sand says the museum only sold items that fell outside of its mission. And she insists it's been careful to use the proceeds nearly $3 million, or half the cost of the renovation to care for the collection.
Ms. SAND: We are not paying for paint. We're not paying for lights. We're not paying for development salaries. We're paying to create an environment where we can now exhibit the premier collection of Philadelphia material culture.
ROSE: But other Philadelphia institutions are still troubled. Page Talbott sits on the board of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, which donated many of the de-accessioned items to the history museum in the first place.
Ms. PAGE TALBOTT (Board Member, Historical Society of Pennsylvania): Let's make sure that if there are local institutions that care about this patrimony, give them the chance to raise the money to purchase the objects, take the time to work within the community in a neighborly kind of way.
ROSE: And you're saying that was not done in this case?
Ms. TALBOTT: It could have been done better.
ROSE: Local institutions are also unhappy about the Philadelphia History Museum's decision to sell a painting by Raphaelle Peale, the son of Charles Wilson Peale, who founded the country's first art museum here in the 19th century.
But former director Viki Sand says other local institutions did know what her museum was selling and that no one came forward to talk about making a deal.
Ms. SAND: We have tried in every way not to be secretive. You know, we haven't stood on a street corner and said: We're de-accessioning, we're de-accessioning. But we have certainly not hidden it.
ROSE: But when I asked Sand about published reports that the Philadelphia History Museum plans to raise an additional one and half million dollars through the sale of a single object, she declined to comment.
For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose in Philadelphia.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
We end this hour with the final story in our series on creative partnerships in the arts. We've explored how clashing personalities produce great music and how translators collaborate with long-dead authors. Today, developing trust when the stakes are high.
NPR's Elizabeth Blair introduces us to a flyer and a catcher in a trapeze act in Cirque du Soleil.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: Cecil B. DeMille once described them like this: The daredevil performers who slap death in the face. A little over-the-top but watching the Cirque du Soleil trapeze artists soaring and somersaulting nearly 46 feet up in the air is heart-stopping.
Ms. MARJON VAN GRUNSVEN (Artistic Director, Cirque du Soleil): It's an incredibly difficult act to do. Even just jumping, it takes courage to do that.
BLAIR: Marjon van Grunsven is the artistic director for Cirque du Soleil's current touring show OVO. She says a flying act is built on trust. But first, she says, each artist needs to be strong individually.
Take flyer Andrey Shapin. He was a gymnast in Russia before he joined Cirque du Soleil two years ago. But he'd never flown before.
Ms. VAN GRUNSVEN: He had to learn how to fly. So he did maybe two flights in the beginning, and now he does most of the flights in the act. So he has developed a tremendous amount. This guy to me is like a rock star.
BLAIR: Andrey Shapin's main catcher is Sergei Phillipenko. And the two men could not be more different in body type and temperament. Phillipenko is tall, 6'1", in his late-20s and easygoing. Shapin is much smaller and younger, and he admits he gets nervous.
Mr. ANDREY SHAPIN (Trapeze Artist): When I do my act, my heart always knocks so fast, you know. I have a lot of adrenaline every day.
BLAIR: Phillipenko, on the other hand, is like the laid back older brother. Do you get nervous?
Mr. SERGEI PHILLIPENKO (Trapeze Artist): Not really.
BLAIR: And he says that's important because another part of his job is to help the flyer relax, especially before a jump.
Mr. PHILLIPENKO: To be calm, to listen, and I think that's a very important part of the catcher.
BLAIR: Cirque du Soleil's show Ovo has an insect theme. The flyers and catchers are scarabs. It's like the heavy metal part of the show.
(Soundbite of music)
BLAIR: Even wearing thick costumes that look like armor, Andrey Shapin does flips, lay-outs and twists with astonishing grace. And Phillipenko says he is there to protect him.
Mr. PHILLIPENKO: My job is to save him all the time.
BLAIR: My job is to save him all the time. Imagine saving someone while swinging by your legs, upside down on a bar, while your partner is diving towards you at high speed.
Mr. SHAPIN: I just know he will catch me, that's it, and this is for sure.
BLAIR: Shapin and Phillipenko do this eight, sometimes 10 times a week. What Shapin and Phillipenko do have in common is the hours and hours of training it takes to be in the exceptionally adventurous Cirque du Soleil. Ovo artistic director Marjon Van Grunsven.
Ms. VAN GRUNSVEN: Their life, literally, is in each other's hands. So if they don't trust each other, we have a big problem.
BLAIR: Sergei Phillipenko and Andrey Shapin say the trust they've developed comes from talking to each other a lot, whether they're on the ground or way up there.
Mr. SHAPIN: On the practice, we always speak. We have fun, jokes. Sometimes if I heard one good song, I give it to him, and we're singing together even there, up there.
BLAIR: Sergei Phillipenko says, when they're up there it's privileged time. Touring the country with Cirque du Soleil, they're constantly surrounded by the other 66 artists, since they live together in pretty close quarters.
Mr. PHILLIPENKO: Here we have a lot of people all the time around us, and up there, we are like only us. It's kind of - I like this moment. Nobody can touch us.
BLAIR: Nobody can hear them when they're talking up there, either. Andrey Shapin says his partner Sergei Phillipenko knows more about him than anyone else.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
NORRIS: And at npr.org you can watch video of the somersaulting and soaring Cirque du Soleil trapeze artists.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Yesterday we heard about the growing use of smartphones for banking in the U.S. Today, to another place where millions of people pullout cell phones to make financial transactions: Kenya. They pay bills, buy goods and send money to family members.
As NPR's Frank Langfitt reports, Kenya's mobile money revolution is helping poor people and boosting local economies.
(Soundbite of conversations)
FRANK LANGFITT: Saimon Outiri works as a cook in a restaurant in Kibera. It's a sprawling, crowded community in Nairobi and one of Africa's largest slums. It's also full of energy. People work on the dirt streets, pounding doorframes together.
(Soundbite of children)
LANGFITT: Kids boot soccer balls.
Like most people here, Saimon Outiri doesn't earn very much, just $4.37 a week. Outiri would like to put that money in a bank, but he can't afford to.
Mr. SAIMON OUTIRI (Cook): If I want to open up a bank account, it cost me some charges, which I am unable to incur.
LANGFITT: So this afternoon, Outiri is depositing his salary onto his cell phone with the help of an M-PESA agent in a kiosk in Kibera. M-PESA is the first mobile money transfer system of its kind in Africa. M stands for mobile, pesa means money in Kiswahili.
Outiri uses the service for all kinds of things.
Mr. OUTIRI: Sometimes I can use the M-PESA may be to pay for rent.
LANGFITT: In addition to paying his landlord, he sends money, e-cash, as it's called, to the cell phone of his mother, who lives 600 miles away. She withdraws the money at an M-PESA kiosk there. Then she uses it to buy staples like salt and sugar.
Outiri says M-PESA also provides security. He'd rather store money on his cell phone than carry cash in Kibera, a place so dicey some businessmen collect payments surrounded by guards with AK-47s. Mugging is a constant worry.
Mr. OUTIRI: Theres robbing, theres pick-pocketing.
LANGFITT: Safaricom, Kenyas leading mobile phone company, launched M-PESA several years ago. Originally, the service was just a marketing tool. The company was targeting people without bank accounts, the vast majority of Kenyans, to get them to subscribe to Safaricom.
But Waceke Mbugua, M-PESAs marketing manager, says the service proved surprisingly popular and useful.
Mr. WACEKE MBUGUA (Marketing Manager, M-PESA): It is growing faster than we expected it to grow.
LANGFITT: After less than four years, M-PESA now has more than 13 million users and 23,000 agents. Transferring money to a person anywhere in Kenya costs about 37 cents. Paying a bill - free.
The University of Marylands Iris Center, which does economic research, interviewed 300 M-PESA users, agents and community leaders last year. Sherri Haas co-authored the study. She says the M-PESA is clearly having an economic impact. For instance, she says the flood of money transfers from urban areas boosted consumer spending in the countryside.
Ms. SHERRI HAAS (University of Maryland): Now that locals were able to receive money into these areas, they were spending their money there, as well. Shop owners would report that they had more business because there was more money circulating within these local communities.
LANGFITT: M-PESA also allows some small business owners to increase their speed and expand their reach.
Ms. PAMELA OMIYO: Im Pamela Omiyo. Im a designer by profession.
LANGFITT: Omiyo runs an open-air dress shop in Kibera. She says her business has tripled in the past several years. Omiyo says much of the reason is M-PESA. It used to take days for her to send and receive payments for fabric and dresses. Now, its instantaneous. She scrolls through her phone to demonstrate.
Ms. OMIYO: See all these messages. M-PESA, M-PESA, M-PESA, M-PESA, all.
LANGFITT: Tell me what each one is?
Ms. OMIYO: This is 5,000.
LANGFITT: Ama Uduno(ph).
Ms. OMIYO: Ama Uduno is in Kimsuno(ph).
LANGFITT: And why did she pay you 5,000?
Ms. OMIYO: Because she wants her fabric. Im packing them now, you see? It's there on the table.
LANGFITT: Her dresses?
Ms. OMIYO: Yeah, her dresses.
LANGFITT: Omiyo even uses the service to pay her workers. In recent months, M-PESA has encountered new competition from other mobile phone companies, but it still dominates the Kenyan market. And its expanded on the continent and beyond, to South Africa and Tanzania, even Fiji.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Nairobi.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And as we mentioned earlier this hour, House Republicans are getting ready for a vote next week to try to repeal the new health care law. That effort is not likely to succeed in the long run, but that's not stopping the Obama administration from beefing up efforts to defend its top domestic achievement.
Among the things the administration is doing, it has dropped a reference to end of life counseling in a health rule. You may remember this as the idea that was erroneously called death panels.
To explain now, we're joined by NPR's Julie Rovner. Julie, with this issue of end of life counseling, I thought this was all taken care of. The final health bill that passed last spring did not include them.
JULIE ROVNER: That's right. Well, for starters, let's start with the fact that they're not death panels. What we're talking about are voluntary visits for Medicare patients to discuss with their doctors what they would like to happen at the end of their lives. Now, this can mean that doctors could take all measures possible to keep them alive or they can have the plug pulled or anything in between. And they can also discuss how to create the legal documents to make sure that those wishes are carried out.
Now, what was originally in the health bill called for doctors to be paid for separate visits to have these discussions. And it got controversial, as you mentioned. And they called it, you know, these death panels and it was dropped from the bill before the bill became law. And so that is not in the law.
NORRIS: Now, we heard a few weeks ago the administration put those counseling sessions back in by regulation. How were they able to do that?
ROVNER: Well, it gets a little bit confusing, so you have to bear with me. Back in 2008 there was a law, and this was when George Bush was president, so before this current debate. Congress specifically said that Medicare doctors could talk about end of life counseling as part of the Medicare physical. And that law passed with bipartisan backing.
Now, until last year's health law passed, people going into Medicare only got one free physical ever. That was when they first signed up for Medicare. The new health law changed that one-time physical to an annual event. So in writing these latest regulations for these now annual physicals, the administration mentioned the end of life counseling, the counseling that was authorized in the 2008 law.
But when the administration realized it could reignite all this controversy over the death panels, then they pulled the language. Of course that wasn't the original - the official reason. The official reason was that there was a process problem, but they realized that they were going to have a political problem too.
NORRIS: So they could essentially just write it in there.
ROVNER: That's right.
NORRIS: So, the bottom line - can doctors and patients still talk about end of life care during those annual physicals?
ROVNER: Absolutely they can. It's still in that 2008 law and it's specifically authorized.
NORRIS: Now, that's kind of defensive move for the administration and we're also hearing about more of their offensive moves. It seems the administration has brought a Google search term that they plan to use. This is very interesting. Tell us about this.
ROVNER: Yes, it's raised a lot of eyebrows. What the administration has done is they bought the term Obamacare, which is what most of the opponents called the health care law...
NORRIS: And not kindly.
ROVNER: Not kindly, that's right. It's usually combined with terms like government takeover or job killing. But now when you search the term Obamacare on Google, the first thing that comes up is a link that connects you to healthcare.gov, which is the official HHS site for the law. The administration says the idea is to give Web surfers a place to get accurate information about health care laws.
NORRIS: And they are using taxpayer funds for this?
ROVNER: Yes. I talked to administration aides and they say it's not the first time the government has spent money to direct people to federal websites by purchasing search terms. This one's costing about a dollar a click, which is not that expensive as these sorts of things go.
What's not clear, however, is whether this is the first time the government has tried to redirect people who are searching for a term used by people who don't like what it is the government's offering, or as one aide said to me, we're taking their term and we're turning it against them.
NORRIS: Thank you, Julie.
ROVNER: You're welcome, Michele.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Julie Rovner.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel gives advice to the executive branch. It's also been at the center of some huge controversies recently. For example, it was lawyers there who wrote the memos during the Bush administration to justify harsh interrogation methods, such as waterboarding. Now, the Obama administration is trying for a second time to find a suitable leader for office.
Today, President Obama nominated Washington lawyer Virginia Seitz, as NPR's Carrie Johnson reports.
CARRIE JOHNSON: The recent history at the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel is filled with disappointment. It's been seven years since the office had a leader confirmed by the Senate, something that veterans like Walter Dellinger shake their heads at.
Professor WALTER DELLINGER (Former Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel): OLC, as we've all learned from the torture memos, is a critically important office. And it is striking - indeed, almost shocking -that since I left as the confirmed head of OLC 14 years ago, for fewer than three of those 14 years has there been a confirmed person head of the Office of Legal Counsel.
JOHNSON: Indiana law professor Dawn Johnsen was the Obama administration's first nominee for the job. But Johnsen stepped aside in April, after months of waiting in vain for the Senate to vote on her nomination. Republicans thought she was too liberal on national security issues. They used articles she wrote during the Bush years to prove it.
Now, the White House is trying again by nominating Virginia Seitz. She's a former Rhodes Scholar and a onetime Supreme Court clerk for Justice Brennan. And if Virginia Seitz isn't a household name, her law partner Peter Keisler says, she should be, because of a Friend of the Court brief she wrote in an affirmative action case a few years ago.
Mr. PETER KEISLER (Partner, Sidley Austin LLP): It was one of the most influential amicus briefs probably in the history of the court.
JOHNSON: During that time, Seitz represented a group of retired military officers. They told the Supreme Court that service members perform better because they take diversity into account. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor cited that argument in the court's landmark opinion in 2003.
But Seitz is known within legal circles for something else, too. Earlier in her career, she quietly blazed a trail for others who might want to work part-time while raising their children.
Here's Keisler.
Mr. KEISLER: She's really actually been a pioneer in demonstrating that you can have a hugely successful first-tier law practice while working part time.
JOHNSON: Seitz left her first law firm, Keisler says, because they offered to continue her part-time arrangement. But the firm, he says, refused to extend that same deal to other lawyers and Seitz thought that was unfair. So she walked.
That sense of conviction would help Seitz at the Office of Legal Counsel, which sometimes must say no to powerful people in the White House.
Jack Goldsmith ran the office during the Bush administration when he stood up to the White House and objected to a warrantless-wiretapping program.
Professor JACK GOLDSMITH (Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel): It's important that there be a Senate-confirmed person at the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, because it helps secure the independence of the office when it's making legal judgments and because it helps give the office more authority, both within the Justice Department and throughout the government.
JOHNSON: Seitz has little experience in national security, an issue that might pose a problem in her confirmation. But the Justice Department will hire a deputy who has a background in those issues, and that satisfies Goldsmith.
Prof. GOLDSMITH: The truth is that all these issues are legal issues, and there are a lot of experts. And so I don't think that sort of prior expertise in national security law is a prerequisite for the job.
JOHNSON: The most important thing, Goldsmith says, is that the leader be a careful lawyer and have good judgment.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
MICHEL NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel at the Capitol.
(Soundbite of gavel)
SIEGEL: With the whack of the gavel, the new Congress opened today. John Boehner and the newly-elected Republican majority took over the House of Representatives.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): Welcome to the people's house, welcome to the 112th Congress.
(Soundbite of applause)
SIEGEL: In just a moment, we'll look ahead with two members of Congress we've been following since they were first elected back in 2006.
But, first, NPR's Audie Cornish reports on the day's big event.
AUDIE CORNISH: With just minutes to go before the start of the new Congress, freshmen lawmakers were still ducking into the lavish red carpeted speakers lobby for their welcome packets.
Representative CEDRIC RICHMOND (Democrat, Louisiana): Oath of office, license plates and our pens and our voting card.
CORNISH: Meet freshman Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, ranked number 413 in seniority out of 435 House members. And Steve Stivers from Ohio, he's a Republican, he's number 426. But Stivers is still smiling, unlike Richmond, who's one of just nine new Democrats, the Ohio Republican is entering with a GOP freshman class of more than 80, and he's eager to get to work.
Representative STEVE STIVERS (Republican, Ohio): Everything has its pomp and circumstance, but I want to get to work and focus on trying to do some things to help get people back to work. Also, I think we got to focus on cutting the size and scope of government.
CORNISH: But, first, they had to get down to the business of choosing their leaders.
Unidentified Woman #1: The roll will now be called and those responding to their names will indicate by surname the nominee of their choosing.
CORNISH: This is mostly ceremonial since both Republicans and Democrats have held their caucus elections. But the roll call highlighted the new balance of power. Ohio Republican John Boehner's name rang out in the chamber 241 times.
Unidentified Woman #2: Boehner.
CORNISH: Democrats mostly fell in line behind Nancy Pelosi. But there were chinks in the California Democrats' armor.
Unidentified Woman #3: Boren.
Representative DAN BOREN (Democrat, Oklahoma): Shuler.
Unidentified Woman #3: Shuler.
CORNISH: Nearly a dozen Blue Dog Democrats voted for someone else - Heath Shuler of North Carolina. But in the end, Republican John Boehner was the victor, of course.
Unidentified Woman #1: The honorable John A. Boehner of the state of Ohio having received the majority of the votes cast is duly elected speaker of the House of Representatives of the 112th Congress.
(Soundbite of cheering)
CORNISH: Unbowed, the first woman speaker of the House took to the floor and in her parting remarks, Nancy Pelosi made one last attempt to defend the Democrats' agenda.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California): We have made the largest ever commitment to making college more affordable.
(Soundbite of applause)
Rep. PELOSI: Enacted Wall Street reform with the greatest consumer protections in history and passed a strong patients' bill of rights.
(Soundbite of applause)
CORNISH: And then Pelosi handed over the gavel and the power to Speaker John Boehner. Boehner already had his handkerchief at the ready, but the trademark tears were in short supply as he outlined the first order of business - a new package of rules he said would make the House operate more openly. But Boehner also made it clear Republicans heard the message from the elections.
Rep. BOEHNER: No longer can we fall short. No longer can we kick the can down the road. The people voted to end business as usual, and today we begin to carry out their instructions.
CORNISH: To Democrats, Boehner pledged a more open process. But a first test of that will come quickly. Republicans are pushing to repeal the health care bill and it's unclear whether they'll allow Democrats any amendments.
Audie Cornish, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Earlier today, we sat down with two members of Congress whom we first met four years ago on a day much like this one. In January 2007, they were both newly arrived freshmen. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat from Tucson, was joining the new Democratic majority. Republican Peter Roskam, from the suburbs west of Chicago, was taking his place on the back benches of the Republican minority.
Well, now things have changed. Giffords, the Democrat, is in the minority and Republican Roskam is now chief deputy majority whip. And they're both with us. Representative Roskam in the studio with me at the Capitol. Representative Giffords from her office nearby. Welcome to both of you.
Representative PETER ROSKAM (Republican, Illinois): Thank you.
Representative GABRIELLE GIFFORDS (Democrat, Arizona): Good morning.
SIEGEL: And, Peter Roskam, let's begin with you. Your party's taking over today. What is the GOP's message to America?
Rep. ROSKAM: Well, I think it is a message that is actually reflecting what a lot of Americans began saying to their representatives about a year ago. We began a process called America Speaking Out, which was a very dynamic online initiative and two town hall meetings. And ultimately came up with an agenda, which was the pledge to America, which focuses on fiscal restraint and job creation and economic prosperity as top priorities for the United States. And so, that's the agenda that I think you're going to see rolling out in these next several months and in the 112th Congress.
SIEGEL: Representative Giffords, how do you as a Democrat read the results of the election and what it says about strategies for getting job creation going? What will you as a Democrat do as the Republicans proceed with their agenda?
Rep. GIFFORDS: First and foremost, work with the Republicans. I come from the state of Arizona, which is a pretty bipartisan state. I formerly served in the minority, know what it's like to work with my Republicans in the majority and in the minority. And that's truly what American people want. I do think it's important, though, to look back on the reflection.
I really don't believe this is a Republican mandate. This is a mandate to get America back to work. But, frankly, even looking at the health care bill, which was very contentious, when individual components of the health care bill were polled, for example, do people want to have their children continue on their insurance plans until they're 26 years of age? Yes. Do people want to see donut hole close? Yes. Do people want to have more affordable prescription drugs? Yes.
All of these things individually polled, but it's very difficult to go through such a productive, such an aggressive agenda. A lot of accomplishments, but the American people are still struggling under years and years of poor economic decisions, which almost drove us back into a great depression.
SIEGEL: Peter Roskam, I've heard your party say the exact opposite, that the election proved that the American people spoke on health care reform, the way you read the polls, they said, get rid of it.
Rep. ROSKAM: Oh, I think they spoke on health care reform very, very clearly. And you look at some of the other components. Not to parse, but Gabrielle didn't mention some of the massive expansions of government programs. For example, putting 15 million new enrollees on Medicaid, which is a classically failing program.
So I think what you're - I know what you're going to see next week. There will be a vote on the floor to repeal and a resolution to replace health care. And we will then move forward with, I think, a really thoughtful debate. And, I mean, hearing Gabrielle's tone, I accept at face value that she really does want to work with everybody in Congress to try and come up with remedies that are moving forward.
But I don't think we can actually question the fact that the current state of affairs is that the health care bill that's now the law is actually a job-killing health care bill. And I've experienced that in my district where manufacturers have said, I'm not hiring new people.
SIEGEL: Gabrielle Giffords, that's almost the Republicans' proper noun for the bill - the job-killing health care law. How do you answer that?
Rep. GIFFORDS: Well, we're the only industrialized country on the entire planet that does not offer basic coverage to its citizens. Because of globalization and the fact that we're not just competing with each other in terms of our states, but we're competing with other countries, the reality is that we provide the opportunity for health care, for not all Americans and, you know, 40, 50 million Americans are either not insured or underinsured. And the cost of health care keeps rising. This, from an economic standpoint, is just not viable.
In talking from a political standpoint, there will be a vote on Wednesday to repeal the health care bill. I'm sure it will pass the House because of the Republicans being the majority. But a political reality is that it will not pass the Senate and even if it were to pass the Senate, it would be vetoed by President Obama. So, again, I think the best thing is for us to look at where the legislation currently is today and in a bipartisan fashion, try to fix the problems with the legislation.
But, you know, again, I come from Arizona, a state with a lot of uninsured people. I voted for the health care reform bill in a Republican district. I got reelected by having numerous town halls, numerous opportunities to explain what was actually in the bill, demystify, again, all of these claims that just were not true about the health care bill, and also committed to fix the problems that do exist in the current piece of legislation.
SIEGEL: Representative Roskam, what about that? The vote to repeal health care, you know that's not going to succeed, that bill. It would never be signed by the president.
Rep. ROSKAM: It may never be signed. But I'm a little bit counterintuitive, so stick with me. If I'm right on this, replay this tape over and over, and if I'm wrong, forget I ever said it.
SIEGEL: (unintelligible)
Rep. ROSKAM: There's 23 Democrat senators right now who are up for reelection in 2012. My feeling is that many of those have watched this election cycle in 2010 and been, frankly, shocked at the level of animation of the public and the disappointment at what the public has seen and want to turn a new page.
Take, for example, in the Midwest, Russ Feingold, fine senator from Wisconsin, lost in a blue state not because he's foolish, not because he's corrupt. He's none of those things. He lost based on the merits of the issues and Wisconsin sent a new Republican here.
So, I think that in all likelihood, if the bill is called - now, that's a different question - if Harry Reid puts it on the floor, it can get to the president's desk. And then that sets the premise for the 2012 presidential election.
SIEGEL: Well, thanks to both of you for talking with us once again. Will you ever get to talk again during the next Congress or just when we bring you together?
Rep. ROSKAM: We'll talk frequently, believe me.
Rep. GIFFORDS: Absolutely. I mean, this is - it's a big place. There's 435 members, but it's a small community as well. And the issues that I face in southern Arizona are the exact same issues that Peter faces in Illinois.
SIEGEL: Well, Representatives Peter Roskam of Illinois, Republican, and Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, Democrat, thanks to both of you.
Rep. ROSKAM: Thank you.
Rep. GIFFORDS: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
A small community indeed, Robert, but how long until today's formalities and all those expressions of goodwill give way to the rough and tumble of politics?
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Yeah, pretty soon. You know, today there are all the children and grandchildren of members on the floor. This was family friendly day at the House of Representatives.
But after that vote on repealing health care, the House Republicans' plan between now and President Obama's State of the Union message to propose some cuts to federal spending and some cuts in federal regulations. And they say they expect to hear the president respond to them with counter proposals that they consider serious and that would then be the basis of real negotiations.
NORRIS: OK. That's what they expect. What happens if that doesn't happen?
SIEGEL: Well, you know, we can expect some legislation to be bottled up for a while, but not for too long because there's a deadline they're all facing for some kind of accommodation. Around March or April, the national debt should exceed the current limit of $14.3 trillion. And they'll have to vote to extend that debt limit. Democrats are warning that not to do so would be tantamount to the U.S. defaulting on its debts. Senior Republicans, you know, tend to share that view, but they point to a lot of newly elected Tea Party endorsed members who intend to drive a very, very hard bargain before they agree to that.
NORRIS: Whenever you see a shift in power, there's a certain amount of posturing that goes on. How hard a bargain can they drive?
SIEGEL: Here's an example. Elsewhere in the program you'll hear Senator Mike Lee, the Utah freshman, say what he thinks would be a sign of good faith. That would be passage of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution this year. That's for him to consider voting to extend the debt ceiling. That's not very likely.
NORRIS: That's my co-host Robert Siegel reporting from the Capitol on the first day of the 112th Congress. Quite a day up there. Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Michele.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Michele Norris.
Today, on the Senate's first day back, Democrats proposed changes to the filibuster. The effort was led by Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico. When we spoke to him earlier this week, he said the intention was to move away from the modern use of the filibuster where, as he said, you file a filibuster and you go home.
Senator TOM UDALL (Democrat, New Mexico): In the simplest terms, it's bringing a filibuster back to "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." You stand up and you have to speak on the issue you really care about.
Ron Elving is the senior editor at NPR's Washington desk, and he joins us now to talk about this. Ron, what has got the Democrats, or at least some Democrats, so frustrated that they want to change the way filibusters are used?
RON ELVING: Michele, it's the failure of the majority to feel as though they can really run the Senate. When they had 60 votes for a period of time in 2009, 2010, they were able to pass that big health care overhaul that was passed last year. But they weren't able to it together in the terms they wanted to. They didnt really feel like they were running the show.
But even beyond that kind of big legislation, they feel like they can't bring up judge confirmations. They can't bring up presidential appointee confirmations because individual senators in the minority can say they're going to potentially exercise their right for extended debate, which is a kind of implied threat to filibuster, and that in effect puts a hold on a bill, sometimes without an identifying the senator who's putting the hold on, what they call secret holds.
And the Senate majority leader, whether he's a Democrat or a Republican -whoever is in the majority - can't really run the show because he's constantly dealing with lots individual operators.
NORRIS: Democrats are in the majority right now. How much support for this among the Democrats?
ELVING: It's not entirely clear and thats part of the reason that they're in negotiation. They're negotiating among the Democrats about which changes they really want to push for. Do they want to attack the secret hold, is that the biggest thing? Do they want to make it impossible to filibuster on the motion that brings a bill to the floor in the first place? Thats a big issue.
Is it possible to stop the Senate from even taking up a bill with a filibuster? Or must the filibuster take place after a debate has begun, the kind of picture that most people have of long speeches, like in the Civil Rights era?
NORRIS: So those who oppose what Udall and the Democrats are trying to do, what is the argument that they make?
ELVING: That if you start to change the rules about how filibusters are used, eventually you're weakening the essential principle of it, which is that it forces the majority to negotiate with the minority and produce consensus legislation thats ultimately more powerful and ultimately more popular.
NORRIS: We've been talking about Senate majority. But as we know and as we've seen in the House that majorities can shift. And Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell writes today in The Washington Post about this issue.
He says, quote, "Do Democrats really want to create a situation where two or four or six years from now they're suddenly powerless to prevent Republicans from overturning legislation they themselves worked so hard to enact?"
Ron, Democrats say the changes are aimed at making the filibuster more transparent and bipartisan. So would these changes actually create problems for the minority party?
ELVING: They would have the same effect on whichever party was in the minority and certainly that gives some Democrats pause, particularly if they want to operate in the same way that some of the Republicans most recently have been operating. And back in the time when the Democrats were in the minority and the Republicans were last in the majority, they did hold up a lot of judgeships during the George W. Bush period. And they did use a lot of these same tactics.
There was a time when the filibuster itself was a kind of nuclear weapon. You only used it once in a great while. In the '40s and in the '50s, there were maybe, oh, singe digit cloture motions to cutoff debate. In a given Congress two years long, single digits, fewer than 10.
Then that started to shoot up. In the '80s, kind of bounced around for a while. And in the last 10 years, its shot way up into the 100 and 100-plus.
This has become not a nuclear weapon that's only used in the most dire circumstances for the biggest issues but a kind of sidearm that every senator wears, walking into the Senate like a cowboy walking into the saloon.
NORRIS: Ron, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: That's Ron Elving. He's NPRs senior Washington editor.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris, and it's time now for your letters.
Yesterday, we talked with 10-year-old Kathryn Aurora Gray, the youngest person ever to discover a supernova. The exploding star was 240 million light years away.
Ms. KATHRYN AURORA GRAY: It's just so far away you'd never be able to see it with only your eyes. You can probably barely see it with a telescope, too.
NORRIS: She found it by comparing old pictures of the night sky with new ones taken on New Year's Eve. Well, Kathryn Gray's youthful enthusiasm touched the star gazer in many of you.
What a delight, writes Ken Sembock(ph) of Ellicott City, Maryland. Hearing the wonder and matter-of-factness in Miss Gray's voice as she described the discovery of her supernova drained away the day's cares and brought a smile to my face. Keep looking at the stars, Miss Gray, you never know what you might find.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. GERRY RAFFERTY (Singer): (Singing) (Unintelligible).
NORRIS: And on to another star, singer and songwriter Gerry Rafferty died this week at age 63, and we remembered his career yesterday.
(Soundbite of music)
NORRIS: John Hathaway of Phoenix wrote, when the saxophone solo of "Baker Street" came grinding out of the radio, I was immediately uplifted and started singing along. When it became apparent it was Gerry Rafferty's obituary, I was saddened but continued to sing.
And the earlier hit by Rafferty band, Stealer's Wheel, prompted questions from a few of you.
(Soundbite of song, "Stuck In the Middle With You")
Mr. RAFFERTY: (Singing) Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am stuck in the middle with you. Yes, I'm stuck in the middle with you, and I'm wondering what it is I should do.
NORRIS: It became clear that many people weren't quite sure who actually wrote that song. John Hathaway(ph) said, what surprised me was realizing I'd long-held a misconception. I always thought Stealer's Wheel was one of Paul McCartney's incarnations and it was McCartney singing the lead on "Stuck in the Middle With You." Thanks for setting me straight and for remembering Mr. Rafferty.
Another listener wrote in with another more common misperception, that the song "Stuck in the Middle With You" was written by Bob Dylan. And I guess I can see why. Gerry Rafferty actually co-wrote "Stuck in the Middle as a parody of Bob Dylan.
Rolling Stone Magazine once wrote that the song struck pay dirt to Rafferty's utter disbelief. It was written as, quote, little more than a joke." But a lot of people thought that really was Bob Dylan singing.
(Soundbite of song, "Stuck in the Middle With You")
NORRIS: Well, we're glad to set the record straight, and frankly, we're glad we got to hear a little bit more of Stealer's Wheel. Keep your letters rolling in. Please write to us by visiting npr.org. Click on Contact Us.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel at the Capitol, where the 112th Congress got underway with a changing of the guard. Democrats still control the Senate - by a narrower margin than before - but in the House of Representatives, Republicans took over the majority today with a big list of things to do and to undo.
Among the visitors this morning in the ornate Statuary Hall of the Capitol Building was Rich Berg(ph), in town from Wheaton, Illinois. He's here for Republican Randy Hultgren's swearing-in. I asked him and some other visitors what they hope to see from this new Congress.
Mr. RICH BERG: That they get intellectually honest with what's going on and not do all the grandstanding and all that other stuff. We have some really problematic issues that have to be dealt with in a serious way.
SIEGEL: Louise Farley(ph) came from Merced, California, to see Republican freshman Jeff Denham sworn in. Her hopes?
Ms. LOUISE FARLEY: Oh, just hope that there will be a new energy and new ideas and one consensus and - on working together.
SIEGEL: And Sandra Baird(ph) of Dublin, Ohio, and Naples, Florida, said this was exciting for her, since her good friend is John Boehner of Ohio.
Ms. SANDRA BEAR: I think it's real important for the nation to rein in a bit on spending and hope they can do it judiciously, so everybody has to sacrifice a little but not one sector becomes too hurt by it.
SIEGEL: This afternoon, after a predictable party-line vote, the outgoing speaker, Democrat Nancy Pelosi of California, spoke of the two parties' common devotion to country, faith and family, made one last pitch for the virtues of the new health care law and then handed over the symbol of the speaker's authority.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California): I now pass this gavel and the sacred trust that goes with it to the new speaker. God bless you, Speaker Boehner.
(Soundbite of cheering)
SIEGEL: John Boehner of Ohio is 61 and a 20-year veteran of the House. He came to Washington near the end of the GOP's 40-year stretch in the wilderness of the minority. He has seen his party win the majority in 1994, lose it in 2006 and regain it last November.
His message today was that the House under his leadership will be more transparent and more accountable than it was under previous majorities both Democratic and Republican.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): We will dispense with the conventional wisdom that bigger bills are always better; that fast legislating is good legislating; allowing amendments and open debate makes the legislative process less efficient than our forefathers had intended. These misconceptions have been the basis for the rituals of a modern Washington. They, in my opinion, have not been served well to the American people.
SIEGEL: Speaker John Boehner referring to how Republicans will run the House of Representatives.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
The incoming majority has made some significant changes to the rules of the House, and NPR's Andrea Seabrook is here to explain them.
Hiya.
ANDREA SEABROOK: Hiya.
SIEGEL: And first, the biggest change has to do with how the Congress spends money.
SEABROOK: Absolutely. There used to be - or there is currently in statute a law called pay-as-you-go. That meant that the Congress had to pay for the new programs that it put in place.
Now, the new Republicans are calling it cut-as-you-go. They have to offset all of new spending and cannot increase taxes of any kind to offset that. So they must find actual spending cuts. This allows them over time to ratchet down spending over and over again with every new program.
Now, the Democrats are really rankled by this, mostly because it doesn't apply in the rules to the health care law which does decrease the deficit over time. And the Republicans are going to vote next week to repeal the health care law, but they say the increase in the deficit that that will cause is not subject to this law, cut-as-you-go.
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm. Now, another change: The incoming chairman of the budget committee, Republican Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, will have new powers.
SEABROOK: Yes. Some of them are calling him the czar of the budget, the budget czar, because he will have unilateral power - this is unprecedented in Congress - to set the budget levels for each committee and each appropriations bill for this year, 2011 only. The reason for that is the Democrats didn't even pass a budget at all last year for this fiscal year that we're in right now. They didn't pass the budget. They didn't pass any appropriations bill.
So the Republicans are saying, well, we got to set levels and we have to start on fiscal year 2012 at the same time so we're just going to give the power to him. Of course, Democrats are saying this is completely undemocratic. There isn't a vote on giving this guy such high powers. So that's an interesting change right there.
SIEGEL: Now, the business of the Capitol is also going to change. No more National Train Day.
SEABROOK: No more National Train Day. No - the new speaker, Boehner, has designated in these rules a prohibition of all commemorative bills, so you'll never hear sort of the Springfield Wildcats...
(Soundbite of laughter)
SEABROOK: ...won their football game last Friday and we want to commemorate them in a vote in the Congress. No more National Pi Day.
SIEGEL: Pi.
SEABROOK: That pi, as in 3.14159 and so, and not pie as in pumpkin.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SEABROOK: And the Republicans have tallied up the votes for the last Congress and they say that fully a third of its business was these sort of commemorative bills. And leaders say they're a waste of time and they're not what the voters sent lawmakers to Washington to do.
SIEGEL: There's a smaller change: All bills are going to be posted online for three days before they go to the floor of the House.
SEABROOK: It's a smaller change, but it's one that could help Americans track better what's going on. And it's sort of a philosophical change. It used to be that if something was considered public, a paper copy of it was taken across the street to the document room. Now, the government is slowly turning to this new idea that if something is public, it means it's posted on the Internet and Americans have access to it.
SIEGEL: Now, some losers under the new rules would be delegates from American territories.
SEABROOK: Yes. American Samoa, the Northern Marianas Islands, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia: the delegates from those places will no longer have any voting rights on the House floor. They had restricted voting rights before. The new Republican rules stripped them even of those.
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Andrea.
SEABROOK: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Andrea Seabrook.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
On the other side of the Capitol today, Democrats began their fifth year in a row in control of the United States Senate. One year ago, they had a filibuster-proof majority, but their ranks have shrunk. And some Democrats used their first day in session to demand changes in rules governing the filibuster. NPR's David Welna is at the Capitol and he has this report.
DAVID WELNA: Only a third of the Senate seats are up for election every two years. So today, those Senators who got reelected along with 13 newly elected members were sworn in by the president of the Senate, Vice President Joe Biden.
Vice President JOE BIDEN: Would you please raise your right hands. I'm going to read the entire oath and you will respond appropriately.
WELNA: And all did as they were told. The Senate now has 47 Republicans, 51 Democrats and two independents who caucus with the Democrats. It also has in its ranks Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski, who today became the first woman ever sworn into a fifth term in the Senate.
Senator BARBARA MIKULSKI (Democrat, Maryland): When I walked down that aisle, I walked into the history books. I never set out to do that. And for me, it's a great honor to join Margaret Chase Smith in the history books.
WELNA: But once the opening day niceties were over, majority leader Harry Reid brought up what for many senators is an unpleasant subject: the desire of some Democrats to change the rules on when filibusters can be used to block legislation or nominations.
Senator HARRY REID: (Democrat, Nevada; Majority Leader): No one can deny that the filibuster has been used for purely political reasons, reasons far beyond those for which this protection was invented and intended. So Mr. President, I say, through the chair, to my distinguished Republican counterpart, my friend, Senator McConnell, in the coming days, let's come together to find a solution.
WELNA: Senator McConnell, of course, is the Republican leader. The people, he said, want to be heard. And only the minority's use of the filibuster can ensure that happens.
Senator MITCH McCONNELL (Republican, Kentucky; Minority Leader): And the response they are now getting from some on the other side instead is a proposal to change the Senate rules so they can continue to do exactly what they want with fewer members than before. Instead of changing their behavior in response to the last election, they want to change the rules.
WELNA: But McConnell also made clear he's willing to work with Reid.
Sen. McCONNELL: At a time when some people think that two parties in Washington can't even agree on the weather, I'll note that Senator Reid and I get along just fine.
WELNA: Whether the Senate gets along with the Republican-controlled House, maybe another story.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In the Senate, no one personifies the 2010 election results more so than the newly-elected freshman senator from Utah. Republican Mike Lee is 39. He is a tea party favorite. His issues are the tea party's issues: fix a government that's too big, that's spending too much and that's borrowing too much.
Senator MIKE LEE (Republican, Utah): We have now a situation in which our national debt will soon reach $15 trillion, and we have a national government that's telling people where to go to the doctor and how to pay for it. And they're starting to ask themselves the question: Is this really what it's supposed to be doing?
SIEGEL: Mike Lee defeated a three-term GOP incumbent at the Utah Republican Convention and then he won the state in a walk. He is a former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, and he takes a narrow view of what the federal government should do. But Mike Lee insists he doesn't hope to turn the clock back to 1787 or 1937 or even 1967.
Sen. LEE: Perhaps 2007. I don't know where the right line is. We have to start with the government that we actually have rather than the one that we perhaps wish we had. So we can't go back and reinvent things, all the way back to square one.
SIEGEL: The Congress and the administration have an appointment with the debt sometime in this year, in the spring, when it'll come to you and your colleagues to either raise the debt limit or not. We've heard Austan Goolsbee, the president's economic advisor, characterize a vote to not lift the debt ceiling as a terribly dangerous thing to do, a message to the country's creditors that we might not be paying our debts. Do you regard that vote as a no result as essentially being impossible for that reason?
Sen. LEE: Well, as I recall, a few years ago, President Obama, who was then a U.S. senator, voted against raising the national debt ceiling, saying that it would be irresponsible. And now all of the sudden you've got his office, now that he's president, taking a very different approach.
I don't think we have to assume that it's catastrophic if we don't approve an effort to raise the debt ceiling. I think what would be catastrophic would be to continue to spend money that we don't have.
And my inclination is to vote against any effort to do that, barring some serious commitment involving a serious compromise that would result in a serious effort to balance the budget.
SIEGEL: You say serious compromise. You would expect the administration to come to you not with what you might want in the way of budget-cutting but something that met you somewhere in between what you want and what they want?
Sen. LEE: Before I would even consider doing it, I'd want a bipartisan commitment that would say, you know, if we're going to vote to extend this, we are going this year to enact a balanced budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
SIEGEL: That would be a condition for extending the debt?
Sen. LEE: That or something very similar to it.
SIEGEL: Senator Lee, thanks a lot for talking with us.
Sen. LEE: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Republican Senator Mike Lee was sworn in today. He's a freshman senator from Utah.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" has become one of the most banned books in history, in part because of its frequent use of the N-word.
Now one Twain scholar has come up with a solution: use a different word. He hoped the new edition of "Huck Finn" would calm the controversy, but as NPR's Larry Abramson reports, it has just created more.
LARRY ABRAMSON: English professor Alan Gribben of Auburn University in Alabama says he came up with this idea while he was on a lecture tour trying to encourage schools to teach Twain.
Professor ALAN GRIBBEN (English Professor, Auburn University): Teachers would come up to me afterwards and say oh, I would love to use your remarks. I would love to get these books into my curriculum, but it's just not possible. The parents are so uncomfortable with them these days.
ABRAMSON: Because of the use of the N-word more than 200 times in "Huck Finn." So for Gribben, this was a way to revive these books in the schools. Instead of the N-word, this alternative version refers to slaves. Here's what the new book would sound like, read by NPR producer Jim Wildman.
JIM WILDMAN: Slaves would come from all around there and give Jim anything they had just for a site of that five-center piece. But they wouldn't touch it because the devil had had his hands on it.
ABRAMSON: Professor Alan Gribben says this is just an experiment to get past a word that has become such an emotional tripwire, a word that NPR reporters also avoid using on the air.
But Gribben says instead of being hailed for resuscitating a banned book, he's gotten slammed.
Prof. GRIBBEN: Just an avalanche of very, very vitriolic emails.
Mr. KAI WRIGHT (Editorial Director, ColorLines.com): I compared it to abstinence-only education for race.
ABRAMSON: Kai Wright attacked the update at ColorLines.com, where he is editorial director. Wright says the revision actually shortchanges schoolchildren because it skirts the lessons they need to learn.
Mr. WRIGHT: What does it mean both for society then, and what does it mean for society now? That's the kind of thing for a teacher to deal with. You can't really talk about race without talking about the ugly parts.
ABRAMSON: Perhaps Gribben should have known there would be a small rebellion when he laid his hands on "Huck Finn," which Hemingway called the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that.
Barbara Jones of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom says what Gribben has done is an act of censorship, which the ALA opposes.
Ms. BARBARA JONES (Office of Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association): To remove a word from a book is just a real insult to the author's wanting to, in this case, express how people spoke in that part of Missouri in the 19th century.
ABRAMSON: The new editions were originally intended for a limited print run of about 7,500 copies, directed mostly at schools and libraries. Of course, it's possible the outrage of the blogosphere will spark more sales.
Professor Alan Gribben is undeterred by all the criticism. He says those emails have just demonstrated how much we need this book. He says even though they all argued for leaving the N-word in "Huckleberry Finn," none would use the word itself.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
A voice you've heard often from the White House is going silent - well, not really. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is leaving. He announced today he will become a private sector consultant to the Obama re-election campaign, and he will appear in the media as a surrogate for the president.
As NPR's Mara Liasson reports, Gibbs isn't the first to leave, and he won't be the last.
MARA LIASSON: The long-anticipated White House shakeup has begun. Here's Robert Gibbs at his familiar perch in the briefing room today, describing the honor and privilege of the job he's about to give up.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (Press Secretary, White House): I have enjoyed every time I've come out here, even on days when you wake up at four and pick up the paper and groan that you have the sense of what the first several questions might be.
LIASSON: With hours like that and no real vacation since he signed on with then-Senator Obama seven years ago, Gibbs is understandably fried.
Mr. ARI FLEISCHER (Former Press Secretary, White House): The White House press secretary job is the most wonderful job in the world, and it's the most burnout job in the world.
LIASSON: That's Ari Fleischer who had Gibbs' job in the Bush White House. Fleischer, like Gibbs, had a sometimes contentious relationship with the press corps. He says the public gets a distorted view of the press secretary from those daily sparring sessions on television.
Mr. FLEISCHER: The briefing room is such a misrepresentation of what the press secretary does. It's a TV show these days. It's not a real briefing anymore. The real work of the press secretary is done behind the scenes, 20 times a day when reporters walk into the press secretary's office, close the door and there's a private conversation between the press secretary and a reporter. That's how the job really gets done.
LIASSON: And that's where Gibbs had the credibility to communicate the president's thinking that came from both unlimited access and a close relationship with Mr. Obama.
Gibbs' replacement will be announced in a few weeks, but the administration has already made some other changes. Next week, Obama's campaign strategist David Plouffe arrives, taking over from David Axelrod who's moving back to Chicago to run the re-election campaign. Plouffe is an old hand, but Gibbs says he counts as fresh blood.
Mr. GIBBS: You have to admit there's a bubble in here to some degree. So I think having new voices and having fresh voices, some of those voices that are coming back from having taken a couple of years off, are an important part of this process.
LIASSON: It's a process Gibbs describes as a major retooling. Soon, there will be a new permanent chief of staff - maybe former Clinton Commerce Secretary William Daley, who is at the White House meeting with the president today. And on Friday, the White House is set to announce several new economic staff appointments.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
There is, of course, another far bigger political transition under way today on Capitol Hill. The Republicans have taken over the majority in the House of Representatives. That means they will set the rules, they'll have majorities on committees and they'll elect the chairman of those committees.
And it means that the leaders of the parties in the House have changed offices, figuratively and literally. Republican John Boehner is now the speaker, and Democrat Nancy Pelosi is now minority leader.
Our colleague, Robert Siegel, visited her yesterday in her new digs.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Leader Pelosi, welcome to the program once again.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California; Minority Leader): Thank you. My pleasure to be here.
SIEGEL: Speaker Boehner told The Wall Street Journal that he intends to give the minority more say, a greater say in the House. For you, what would be a meaningful example of having a greater say?
Rep. PELOSI: Well, one example hasn't happened. And that is the Republicans have cut the number of members on committees unilaterally. Can you just imagine when I came in as speaker if I said I will determine how many members there are on committees? I would have thought that would have been a bipartisan effort.
But having said that, you know, I would hope that as we have had many hearings on legislation coming before the Congress where both parties have participated and have been part of the product, including health care reform.
SIEGEL: Speaking of health care reform, the Republicans intend to repeal it. The House Republicans should do that easily.
Given the degree of public criticism of the health care law, which evidently has surprised Democrats, are there some parts of the law, some substantive parts, that perhaps should be changed or repealed?
Rep. PELOSI: Well, I think any bill should be subjected to scrutiny to make sure it fulfills its original purpose and its implementation - solve problems for the American people.
Having said that, you can't just say, well, I'm for having pre-existing conditions not be a cause for loss of coverage, unless you have the comprehensive bill.
Individual parts of the bill are very popular: pre-existing conditions, no cap on coverage, caps on premiums, having your child stay on your policy until he or she is 26 years old, initiatives for America's seniors. What is important, though, to know is in order to have those provisions, you have to have comprehensive health care reform.
SIEGEL: But this was part of the test that the parties just went through in the midterm elections. And although people approved of certain aspects of the health care law, on balance, the country is very divided. And those who are against that law, won the majority.
Rep. PELOSI: Well, I think that this election was about 9.5 percent unemployment. It wasn't a referendum on health care reform. If we had never passed the bill and had 9.5 percent unemployment, we would have the same result in the election, I believe.
SIEGEL: Republicans say they'd like to cut $100 billion of non-defense spending from the budget. You've been in the Congress for a while now. Can that be done?
Rep. PELOSI: Well, it'd be interesting to see what they are going to suggest. If they're cutting education, it's a false economy. If you're talking about letting defense contractors off the hook, which I think that they have eliminated from their freeze, then I don't think that that's a very good idea.
We want our men and women in uniform to have what they need to fight in battle and the quality of life they and their families deserve for the sacrifice they make to our country. That does not necessarily apply to defense contractors. I'm sure they could find substantial savings there.
SIEGEL: If you included defense contractors, I mean, if you were sitting in a room right now on the back of an envelope, could you come up with $100 billion if that's...
Rep. PELOSI: I don't think anybody can do it on the back of an envelop without seriously considering the ramifications.
Yes, we know there's important savings to be made in terms of defense contractors. We have said over and over; waste, fraud and abuse - and I've told my chairman, now ranking members, subject every federal dollar to harsh scrutiny as to whether it delivers what it's supposed to deliver, whether it's duplicative or obsolete.
So we all have to be honing our skills in terms of sharpening our pencils in terms of deficit reduction.
SIEGEL: Having been speaker and now trading places with...
Rep. PELOSI: Yeah.
SIEGEL: ...Minority Leader Boehner, what's your advice? What would you - and in your - in the most non-partisan spirit you could muster, what's your advice to the new speaker?
Rep. PELOSI: Well, first, let me congratulate Speaker Boehner for his victory and the Republicans in the Congress for their majority. I wish him success. And I hope that he will proceed, as he has said, in the open manner that he has suggested.
I believe that the American people expect and deserve us to find our common ground. If we don't, though, we have to stand our ground. And I know that he knows that. Far be it for me to give him advice. He's been looking for this opportunity for a long time.
As I've said, if he has suggestions that will be - solve problems for the American people, he will find in the Democrats a willing partner.
SIEGEL: Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, thank you very much for talking with us again.
Rep. PELOSI: Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you, Robert.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Among those attending today's opening ceremonies at the House of Representatives were plenty of nonvoters. They were generally short. And most wore crisp suits and starchy dresses, usually reserved for worship service or the occasional wedding.
I'm talking about the children who turned out to watch their family or friends get sworn in.
Ms. 'NESHAMBIA SOULE(ph): I'm 'Neshambia Soule and I'm from Prattville, Alabama. Everything was like moving fast. You've seen a lot of people and people coming up to you greeting you very nicely even though they don't know you. It was just a nice experience for, like, people who have never been in here before. So it was real nice.
Mr. JULIAN CAVERLY(ph): My name is Julian Caverly and I am from Los Angeles. My grandma is a congresswoman, so we just went to the swearing-in. It was cool.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CAVERLY: It was too many big words and speeches.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CAVERLY: And it was really long.
Ms. SHALA KINSINGER(ph): Shala Kinsinger and Sofia Kinsinger(ph).
Ms. SOFIA KINSINGER: Nine.
Ms. SHALA KINSINGER: It was really exciting because I've always wanted to be the president when I grow up.
Ms. SOFIA KINSINGER: I wasn't bored at all. I was kind of into it.
Ms. SHALA KINSINGER: I barely was watching it because I was playing on my uncle's phone.
NORRIS: Children who were exhilarated by today's opening session of Congress.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
The Obama administration is sounding upbeat about a crucial vote taking place in Sudan starting this weekend. People in the south of Sudan are deciding whether they want to secede.
NPR's Michele Kelemen reports that the U.S. is diplomatically invested in this vote.
MICHELE KELEMEN: As one of the countries that helped broker the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in Sudan, officials say the U.S. is determined to see this peace process through. The U.S. quadrupled the diplomats it has in South Sudan and has envoys shuttling between the north and south.
Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson says he's more optimistic after Sudan's president visited the south this week and vowed to accept the outcome of the vote.
Mr. JOHNNIE CARSON (Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of African Affairs): We hope that the north will live up to those very promising statements and that we are about to see the end of what has been a really enormously successful diplomatic effort to end what had been 20 years of violence and conflict between the north and the south.
KELEMEN: But even if the vote does go smoothly, there are still many unresolved questions from borders to oil sharing, and there's likely to be a new nation to support. Carson says the U.S. is ready to help.
Mr. CARSON: If the people of Southern Sudan choose to vote for peace, that we will also, as a country, help that new nation to succeed, get on its feet economically and politically.
KELEMEN: A former U.S. envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, says he's been amazed at the changes in the past few years in Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Roads have been paved and hotels have sprouted up. He's more concerned about the stability in the north after the vote if the Islamist government there continues repressive policies against other marginalized groups.
Mr. ANDREW NATSIOS (Georgetown University): The rebels in Darfur, the Nuba Mountains, the Blue Nile, the Beja people in the Red Sea province, these provinces are all areas of disaffection to the central government, and how the government deals with this is going to determine whether or not the country becomes a failed state.
KELEMEN: Natsios - now at Georgetown University - thinks the international criminal court indictment against President Omar al-Bashir for crimes in Darfur complicates matters, but he says it was a good sign that Bashir went to South Sudan. It may have helped, Natsios says, that the Obama administration offered Bashir's National Congress Party a path toward normal ties.
Mr. NATSIOS: He sees that there's a potential for a rapprochement with the West. I think the incentive package that the administration has presented to him is changing the calculations of the NCP. I could be wrong, but there's evidence of it. And he may realize that the path that they've been on all these years simply does not work.
KELEMEN: Assistant Secretary of State Carson says a successful independence referendum in the south will bring Khartoum one step closer on the path toward normalized ties with Washington.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
And here's a hopeful story about a man who's been homeless. At a freeway exit ramp, he held a cardboard sign that read: I have a God-given gift of voice. Fork over a dollar, and he'd share his talent.
Mr. TED WILLIAMS: You're listening to nothing but the best of oldies. You're listening to Magic 98.9.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. WILLIAMS: Thank you so much.
NORRIS: That's the voice of Ted Williams recorded at a stoplight in Columbus, Ohio. The man who took that video is Doral Chenoweth.
Mr. DORAL CHENOWETH: He sounded, you know, better than the NPR News announcers. It seemed like he was really good. And I was taken aback by it, but, yeah, flipped him a dollar and moved on. The light turned green, I had to go.
NORRIS: Chenoweth works for The Columbus Dispatch. That's a newspaper. He posted his video online yesterday, and it went viral. It's been viewed millions of times.
Ted Williams used to work in radio, but he says he started drinking and using drugs. He did time for theft. Still...
Mr. WILLIAMS: I used to always - it just has this inner, like, the Lord didn't take my voice away. You know, I said maybe I can get into ministry or read children's books or narrate something, you know?
NORRIS: Ted Williams was interviewed by WNCI in Columbus today. He says he's been clean for two years. Now, in two days, Williams has gone from unknown pauper to wildly popular. Thanks to that video, he's been summoned to appear on network TV news, and he could land a job.
ESPN, MTV and the Cleveland Cavaliers are all making offers.
Mr. WILLIAMS: And we'll be back with more right after these words.
NORRIS: Good luck, Ted.
(Soundbite of song, "I Could Have Danced All Night")
Ms. AUDREY HEPBURN (Actress): (Singing) Bed, bed, I couldn't go to bed. My head's too light to try to set it down.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
My, how show tunes can conjure up a place and time. Listen to this tune and you think of an enraptured Audrey Hepburn, swirling around in a white nightgown in the film "My Fair Lady."
(Soundbite of song, "I Could Have Danced All Night")
Ms. HEPBURN: (Singing) I could have danced all night. I could have danced all night.
NORRIS: Or Deborah Kerr aboard a ship bound for Siam singing this jaunty tune to her young son.
(Soundbite of song, "I Whistle a Happy Tune")
Ms. DEBORAH KERR (Actress): (Singing) Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect and whistle a happy tune so no one will suspect I'm afraid.
NORRIS: Or how about Natalie Wood bursting with the kind of joy that can only mean one thing: She's in love.
(Soundbite of song, "I Feel Pretty")
Ms. NATALIE WOOD (Actress): (Singing) I feel stunning and entrancing. Feel like running and dancing for joy for I'm loved by a pretty, wonderful boy.
NORRIS: What you are actually hearing there was a voice that belongs to someone whose name is a bit less familiar. It's Marni Nixon, a playback singer known as The Ghostess with the Mostess because her voice was dubbed in for several top actresses in a string of blockbuster musicals.
However, the classically trained soprano will get top billing this year when she steps on stage as the winner of the 2011 George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to American Music. Marni Nixon joins us now, and some part of me wishes that you would sing your hello.
Ms. MARNI NIXON (Playback Singer): Hello.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. NIXON: (Singing) Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: How did you become a playback singer?
Ms. NIXON: Well, actually, in Los Angeles, where I was born and raised, I was doing a lot of classical singing and opera work, and the dubbing that I was doing, to me, was just like a lark. It was an acting job. I had to - as a child, I was a child actress for the past season of Playhouse and I've done a lot of movie work. And I was working as a messenger girl at MGM just to make a living for my classical career. And word just got around town and they've kept calling me for various people. And so the dubbing career began.
(Soundbite of song, "Hello, Young Lovers")
Ms. KERR: (Singing) There are new lovers now on the same silent hill looking on the same blue sea.
NORRIS: How did this process work? Help me understand how Deborah Kerr can sing all those numbers from "The King and I," for instance, and do it convincingly, when it's really your voice that we're hearing.
Ms. NIXON: Well, it's actually prerecorded. And we worked extensively together before we did the recordings. She would come onto the soundstage where I was learning the songs and she was learning the songs. They would have furniture set up according to what the set was to be. She would walk through the number singing the songs. I would walk with her as if I were actually a ghost image watching her mouth and listening to her sing at the same time as I was singing. And then when we got it together, we would then go to the soundstage and record that piece. It was her job to mouth to that when they did the filming.
NORRIS: When you filmed "The King and I," studio executives wanted to keep your ghosting role a secret. Why did they go to such length to keep you in the shadows?
Ms. NIXON: Well, in those days, it wasn't known that that was a process that was going on at all. I don't think that they felt that was a good sale - a market salesmanship. I think that the movies thought that they would - people would boycott the movie if they knew that.
NORRIS: You've told in your own stories and in your own biography, described working with many of these top Hollywood actresses, and it sounds like some of them had, shall we say, a fear of working with ghosts. How did you handle that? I mean, which actresses were accepting of this and which of them didn't much like the idea?
Ms. NIXON: Well, of course, Deborah Kerr accepted the whole thing and worked with me extensively. Natalie Wood, there was a lot of fear. It made her angry when they then threw out all of her soundtrack at the end and put mine in. Audrey Hepburn was very cool and wonderful. And she would allow me to be at her voice lesson there at the studio and listen to her so I could get really used to her speech pattern, which was very unique.
(Soundbite of song, "Just You Wait")
Ms. HEPBURN: (Singing) One day I'll be famous. I'll be proper and prim. Go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim. One...
NORRIS: You know, many of these films won a lot of awards, including Oscars. How did you usually spend those evenings?
Ms. NIXON: I was very thrilled. I kind of like had accepted that I wasn't going to get any major things at the Academy Awards. I guess I just swallowed it and just went along with the enjoyment of it, and I was happy to be doing a good job in a technical way. Because I was doing so much on stage, I guess my ego was not that upset, although I just thought it was a little unfair.
And then over the years, it started getting to be known as it should have, and it didn't take away the luminosity of the picture. And I think it paved the way for other dubbers and for the reality of that process that was going on, I guess.
NORRIS: We've been speaking with Marni Nixon. She's a soprano whose voice was dubbed in for the top stars in films like "My Fair Lady," "The King and I" and "West Side Story," among other credits. She's the winner of this year's George Peabody Medal for Outstanding Contributions to Music in America. Congratulations to you.
Ms. NIXON: Thank you so much.
(Soundbite of song, "Tonight")
Ms. WOOD: (Singing) Tonight, tonight, there's only you tonight. What you are, what you do, what you say.
Mr. RICHARD BEYMER (Actor): (Singing) Today, all day I had the feeling...
NORRIS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Motown artist Tammi Terrell was just 24 when she died of a brain tumor in 1970. But she was already a star, thanks to her duets with Marvin Gaye, including Aint No Mountain High Enough. Even before her big break with Gaye, Terrell had a promising solo career. Now for the first time, her solo recordings have been collected into an anthology. It's called Come On and See Me.
Oliver Wang has our review.
OLIVER WANG: Tammi Terrell was a Philly girl who became a star performing on local television before being discovered by Scepter Records in 1960.
Born Thomasina Montgomery, she recorded as Tammy Montgomery, barely 15 when Scepter put her to work covering Shirelles songs.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified People: (singing) I know, I know, I know, yes, I know. I know he will never be true.
WANG: Bubblegum, however, was not the teenagers strong suit. Montgomery possessed a preternaturally mature voice that not only could belt with the best of them, but her volume was matched with a sophisticated sense of phrasing that laid the groundwork for such later singers as Dionne Warwick.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Woman #1: (singing) (Unintelligible).
WANG: This early phase of Montgomerys career yielded a number of impressive singles, and if all you know of the singers work are her duets with Marvin Gaye, its worth revisiting her recordings with other R&B talents, including her one-time boyfriend, James Brown.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. TAMMI TERRELL (Singer): (Singing) If you don't think that I (unintelligible), now if you know think that, no, you better change. You better change.
WANG: Motowns Berry Gordy heard Montgomery in a Detroit club in 1965, signed her and renamed the singer Tammi Terrell. In 1967, producer Harvey Fuqua struck upon the idea of pairing Terrell with his protege, Marvin Gaye.
Their vocal chemistry was instantly compelling, despite the fact that they tracked most of their early hits during separate recording sessions. Heres Terrell singing her half of Aint No Mountain High Enough with an uncredited male vocalist serving as a placeholder for Gaye.
(Soundbite of song, "Aint No Mountain High Enough")
Ms. TERRELL and Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Ain't no mountain high, ain't no valley low, ain't no river wide enough, baby. If you need me, call me, no matter where you are, no matter how far. Just call my name, I'll be there in a hurry. You don't have to worry 'cuz baby there ain't no mountain high enough, ain't...
WANG: Terrell fell ill in late 1967, and Motown fixated on cranking out more duets, giving short shrift to her solo work. Even on Irresistible, her lone Motown LP, the label cannibalized some of the solo songs and remixed them into duets.
Motown also mothballed some of her best tracks, including this Stevie Wonder-penned gem that Terrell recorded in 1966 but went unreleased for decades.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. TERRELL: (Singing) You made my (unintelligible). You're getting to be my one desire. You're getting to be all that matters to me.
WANG: Terrells death at 24 is one of soul musics great tragedies, and its impossible not to wonder what her career, and Gayes, might have been under better circumstances.
Nevertheless, the new collection, Come On and See Me finally presents her full range of talent and personality and assures Terrell will never be left forgotten or forsaken.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. TERRELL: (Singing) Don't let me be someone who's left alone, forgotten and forsaken. Just let me be...
BLOCK: Our reviewer Oliver Wang runs the audio blog SoulSides.com.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
A medical journal in the U.K. says the British doctor who became famous for linking autism to a childhood vaccine committed scientific fraud. The allegation involves a 1998 study by Andrew Wakefield that gained worldwide attention, but has since been widely and repeatedly discredited.
Now, an investigation by the British Medical Journal has concluded that Wakefield altered or fabricated basic information about the children in his study.
NPR's Jon Hamilton has the story.
JON HAMILTON: The new findings come from Brian Deer, a journalist in the U.K. who has been debunking Wakefield's claims for seven years now.
Many scientists questioned the original study when it was published in the journal The Lancet. Eventually, Wakefield's co-authors disavowed the study, and the journal retracted it. And last year, Wakefield lost his medical license. The disciplinary hearing leading up to that made public medical records on the 12 children in his study.
Deer has now compared those records with Wakefield's claims, and found that almost nothing checked out.
Mr. BRIAN DEER (Journalist): Three out of nine cases - he said - had regressive autism, didn't have autism diagnosis at all. Where he said children had problems developing within days of vaccination, we find either that the children had developed their problems before vaccination or alternatively, months after vaccinations.
Where he said all the children had an inflammatory bowel disease, we were able to get at the actual hospital records and show that they did not diagnose any inflammatory bowel disease.
HAMILTON: Deer says editors at the British Medical Journal checked the records on their own before publishing his investigation and an accompanying editorial.
Mr. DEER: They satisfied themselves that what I was saying was accurate and, on that basis, adjudicated that this was willful fraud.
HAMILTON: Deer's findings are no surprise to people who've been following the Wakefield case.
Paul Offit is a pediatrician at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and a champion of childhood vaccination.
Dr. PAUL OFFIT (Pediatrician, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia): I don't think anything is new here. Even the revelation - quote, unquote -that he had altered clinical data to fit his hypothesis is not new. I think what we've learned from this is that this was not a scientist.
HAMILTON: Instead, Offit says, Wakefield was a man with a very strong belief, which probably helped him influence people in a way that did great harm. Offit says Wakefield's public comments helped cause vaccination rates in the U.K. to decline sharply. The result, he says, is that hundreds of kids have been hospitalized for things like measles and whooping cough; four have died.
Dr. OFFIT: And so basically, that paper killed four children. And who's responsible? I mean, you can argue Wakefield certainly was responsible, but so was the editor of that journal, and so was the media that sort of ravenously followed that story as if it was a fact when clearly, it was wrong. And I think as a public health and scientific community, we didn't stand up hard and strong enough to prevent that.
HAMILTON: Wakefield's ideas tapped into many people's distrust of drug companies and the government, along with their desire to protect children.
David Ropeik is an instructor at Harvard, and the author of a book about why we tend to focus on certain risks while ignoring others. Ropeik says more revelations about Wakefield aren't likely to make the fear of vaccines go away. But he says something else, eventually, will.
Mr. DAVID ROPEIK (Director of Risk Communication, Harvard Center for Risk Analysis): As more and more and more people get measles and kids die - which is happening around the world - eventually, the threat of the disease will come back and surmount our fear of the vaccine.
HAMILTON: In the meantime, Andrew Wakefield says in a statement that he continues to stand behind his 1998 study.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
I'm Melissa Block.
And we begin this hour in Iraq, where radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has returned home after nearly four years in exile. He is one of Iraq's most vocal critics of the U.S. His militia clashed repeatedly with American forces, and Sadr loyalists were behind much of the violence during Iraq's sectarian war. Now, though, Sadr says his purpose in Iraq is political, not violent.
NPR's Kelly McEvers reports from Baghdad.
KELLY MCEVERS: Sadr's return has been uncharacteristically subdued - no rallies, no speeches, just a visit to a holy shrine in his hometown of Najaf and meetings with aides behind closed doors. On local TV, the story was mentioned only briefly.
(Soundbite of local news)
Unidentified Woman: (Speaking foreign language)
MCEVERS: Sadr reportedly has been doing intensive religious study in Iran. His spokesman says he will continue these studies in Najaf.
(Soundbite of local news)
Unidentified Woman: (Speaking foreign language)
MCEVERS: Now, questions are turning to what Sadr's political role will be in Iraq. His party gained about 12 percent of Parliament seats in last year's election. But it was Sadr's support for incumbent Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that gave Maliki enough of an edge over his rivals to secure a second term. Many analysts say Sadr is looking to style his group as the next Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that now wields considerable power in Lebanon's government.
The reasoning that both groups give for maintaining an armed wing is resistance. In Lebanon, it's resistance against Israel. Here, says Sadr political adviser Balqis al-Khafaji, it's resistance against American troops.
Ms. BALQIS AL-KHAFAJI (Political Adviser to Muqtada al-Sadr): (Through translator) Let me here clarify the resistance against whom. It's against the occupation, and not against the people, the Iraqi people. While on the other hand, the political committee has another path, which is peaceful.
MCEVERS: Peaceful activities in the form of services to the poor and previously disenfranchised Shiites of Iraq. Young and loyal Sadrists like Uday Awad Kadhim are thought by many to be the future of Sadr's movement. An electrical engineer from the Shiite-majority south, Kadhim was recently elected to Parliament. He says the fact that Sadr's party took just a few, minor ministries in the new government, like labor and public works, is all part of the plan.
Mr. UDAY AWAD KADHIM (Parliament Member, al-Ahrar Bloc of Iraq): (Through translator) Other parties are looking for authorized ministries and security ministries, while our aim, according to the announcement of our leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, we are looking for service ministries, to serve people.
MCEVERS: Some Iraqis, many of them Sunnis, say this new image of the Sadr movement as one that resists Americans but serves Iraqis will never sell, especially among people who well remember when Sadr-affiliated death squads terrorized Iraqis during the sectarian war.
But other Iraqis, like Abu Aya, who owns a wedding shop in an upscale Sunni neighborhood here in the capital, are willing to give Sadr a chance.
Mr. ABU AYA (Store Owner): (Speaking foreign language)
MCEVERS: If he's here to do good for the Iraqi people, Abu Aya says, then I say, welcome. But if he's here to hurt us, then God protect him against our fury.
Kelly McEvers, NPR News, Baghdad.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And Im Melissa Block.
California's high unemployment, and slow economic recovery, have created a grim reality for some families. They're worried about putting food on the table. In response, the city of Los Angeles is trying to create a new kind of recycling program.
As NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates reports, it's meant to keep tons of good food from going into the trash can.
(Soundbite of vehicles)
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES: The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank is a busy place. It donates produce, canned and frozen items to scores of humanitarian groups and local food pantries.
On this day, the parking lot is jammed with idling vans waiting to be loaded. Food Bank President Michael Flood surveys the warehouse, and says he's seeing a whole new level of need.
Mr. MICHAEL FLOOD (President, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank): There are so many new people in line. I can't tell you how many times I've heard from somebody, saying: I used to be a donor, and I never thought I was going to be standing in line at a food pantry, needing help and needing assistance.
BATES: The newly needy include a woman named Marina(ph), who's too embarrassed to give us her last name. We meet her at a food pantry in Culver City.
MARINA: This is my first time at a food bank. I just lost my job, and there's five of us in the house - my daughter and her two sons.
BATES: Marinas daughter and grandchildren moved in with her after their family restaurant folded. Her husband is still working, but his salary now has to feed five people. Financially, they're at the breaking point.
This is the new face of hunger in Los Angeles, says L.A. City Councilman Jose Huizar.
Mr. JOSE HUIZAR (Councilman, Los Angeles): Today in Los Angeles, about a third of low-income people are food insecure - meaning, they dont know where they will get their next meal from.
BATES: Huizar acknowledges the sad irony - people going hungry when tons of good food is tossed in the trash here every day. Thats what prompted the councilman to call for a new kind of recycling for L.A. His measure, passed late last year, requires every city agency to look for ways to save surplus food from city-sponsored programs and events.
Mr. HUIZAR: We hope that we not only make a cultural change, that it is something common that people think about when they have any surplus food. And secondly, build the infrastructure that makes it a lot easier to donate surplus food. Thats our goal.
BATES: It's expanding the kind of food recycling that some have been doing for a while. The L.A. Convention Center, for example, gives leftovers from big events to several local homeless shelters. Surplus food from one recent event there reportedly was enough to feed 3,000 people.
Then there are the charitable groups, such as Angel Harvest. It locates and recycles food from lots of sources, including local companies.
Mr. ROY GUSMAN (Driver, Angel Harvest): We're on the Santa Monica Freeway; we're going downtown to Farmer John's.
BATES: On this day, Angel Harvest driver Roy Gusman is headed to Farmer John's, a pork processor near downtown L.A. The company is donating 250 fresh hams. Gusman has a notebook of local food pantries in need.
Mr. GUSMAN: It's kind of listed in a way where it tells me how people theyll feed in a day, about - tells me about their storage, and it tells me any of their restrictions.
Unidentified Woman #1: Can you guys get a towel?
Unidentified Woman #2: Yeah.
BATES: Some of those hams will wind up with a very happy Alexandra Tostes at a Salvation Army shelter that houses more than 500 people.
Ms. ALEXANDRA TOSTES (Associate Director, Salvation Army): To get a donation like these hams, you know, it's going to make a great difference to us. Ham is a luxury item for our meals.
BATES: Gusman makes another stop nearby at Feast, a Hollywood catering company. The catering boss, Harvey Slater, says he's glad someone can use the frittatas and home fries left over from a corporate breakfast.
Mr. HARVEY SLATER (Director of Catering and Event Planning): You know, I figure we're probably going to feed about a hundred more people today. And so we had 700 happy clients, and we get to feed some needy people.
BATES: Those involved in L.A.'s food recycling say it's a mindset that hopefully, will catch on - the way recycling cans, bottles and newspapers did long ago. And it could solve the biggest part of the city's hunger problem: getting food to people who need it.
Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
About a third of the material that gushed into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP blowout wasn't oil. It was natural gas. And scientists have been trying to figure out what happened to all of that carbon-rich gas, and whether it's disrupted the Gulf's ecosystems.
Well, a new study concludes that it's gone - quickly eaten by bacteria.
But as NPR's Richard Harris reports, that conclusion is stirring a bit of controversy.
RICHARD HARRIS: While most of the world was focusing on the frightening oil slick spreading across the Gulf of Mexico, John Kessler from Texas A&M University was wondering what was happening to all the methane gas that bubbled out of BP's Macondo well. It had the potential, at least, to deplete oxygen that fish and shrimp need.
He was on an early scientific expedition to the Gulf.
Dr. JOHN KESSLER (Assistant Professor of Oceanography, Texas A&M): We were first out in the middle of June, and it was at that time where we were noticing very large concentrations of methane in the deep ocean.
HARRIS: The methane didn't seem to be bubbling to the surface, and undersea bacteria were eating it - but very slowly.
Dr. KESSLER: This wasn't terribly surprising because most of the places we normally study are fairly active natural methane seeps around the planet. And even in those natural environments, the rate at which methane decomposes is fairly slow as well.
HARRIS: So Kessler, along with many other marine scientists, figured that methane from the blowout would persist in the deep ocean for many years. He and some colleagues returned to the Gulf in August, expecting to find plenty of methane still out there.
Dr. KESSLER: What we were met with was an entirely different story.
HARRIS: They took more than 200 water samples and found, essentially, no excess methane. Two things could have happened to it.
Dr. KESSLER: Did methane itself just dilute out, or was it consumed by some of the indigenous bacteria that are in the water?
HARRIS: There are bacteria in the Gulf of Mexico known for their ability to gobble up methane. And sure enough, Kessler and his colleagues found those bacteria in abundance. They also looked at oxygen levels because these bacteria consume oxygen when they eat methane. And Kessler and his colleagues report in Science magazine that oxygen was also depleted in the deepwater layer where they had originally found the methane.
Dr. KESSLER: All of that oxygen loss could only be explained by a complete consumption of the methane.
HARRIS: So Kessler's paper concludes that in just 120 days, bacteria basically gobbled up all of this methane, and turned it into carbon dioxide and organic carbon.
Ian MacDonald at Florida State University, for one, is not so sure.
Dr. IAN MacDONALD (Professor of Oceanography, Florida State University): I'm not totally convinced by the data that they present here.
HARRIS: For one thing, it seems odd that the methane-eating bacteria usually do their work quite slowly around natural methane seeps, but became super speedy around the oil well. And MacDonald says nobody really managed to trace the deep undersea currents, which could have carried away the methane.
Dr. MacDONALD: It's possible that there was enough flow, enough current movement - water movement through this region, that what we're looking at is not so much the disappearance of gas due to consumption by the microbes, but simply by mixing.
HARRIS: Further tests of the Gulf water can help resolve this puzzle. If bacteria did, indeed, eat up the oil, they should have left behind telltale traces of ancient carbon from these fossil fuels. What we're witnessing here, MacDonald says, is science in progress, so no single study is likely to provide a definitive answer.
Dr. MacDONALD: And the exciting thing about the science that's happening here is that there are alternative ideas, and there are plausible alternative ideas being put forward by very respectable and capable people. And it's - I think it's just going to teach us a lot about this giant experiment, and how the ocean works.
HARRIS: MacDonald and Kessler both agree that the methane findings are reassuring. Whatever happened to the methane, it does not seem to have caused obvious damage to the economically valuable ecosystems near the surface, or near the shore, in the Gulf of Mexico.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
As first lines go, the beginning of Lisa Grunwald's book "The Irresistible Henry House" is quite intriguing.
Ms. LISA GRUNWALD (Author, "The Irresistible Henry House"): (reading) By the time Henry House was 4 months old, a copy of his picture was being carried in the pocketbooks of seven different women, each of whom called him her son.
NORRIS: And thats Lisa Grunwald, reading from her book.
The book is a work of fiction, but the premise is based on fact. From around 1919 to 1969, college home economics programs around the country had so-called practice houses or practice apartments, where young women learned the domestic art: cooking, cleaning, running a household.
The college students learned about mothering skills by caring for practice babies - infants lent by local orphanages to live at the school.
We wanted to learn more about practice babies so we've asked the author, Lisa Grunwald, to join us to talk about this. Welcome to the program.
Ms. GRUNWALD: Thanks so much.
NORRIS: How did you discover this?
Ms. GRUNWALD: Well, I was working on a book of American women's letters, an anthology, and I found this snapshot on a website - of the most beguiling baby, with this roguish grin. And I wondered who he was, and I clicked on his picture and learned that he had been a practice baby at Cornell. And he had been cared for by about a dozen women, who took turns being his practice mother.
NORRIS: At Cornell University.
Ms. GRUNWALD: Mm-hmm, but it turns out that it was common throughout the country. By the 50s, there were 40 or 50 colleges and universities around the country who actually had this program in place, or something very similar.
NORRIS: You know, that child that you first saw, his name was also interesting. He obviously wasnt Henry House. But tell us about his name.
Ms. GRUNWALD: His name was Bobby Domecon, it was for domestic economics. And all of the babies at Cornell were named something Domecon. So there was Bobby Domecon and Mable Domecon, and even one baby whose name was Dickey Domecon. In Illinois State University, all of the babies were named something North or something South, depending on which building they were raised in.
NORRIS: How did this process of practice mothering work?
Ms. GRUNWALD: Well, a little bit differently in each place. But the gist of it seems to have been that the baby would come from the orphanage - an infant -and be cared for in rotation. So at some universities, it was sort of each mother a week at a time, or 10 days at a time. In others, it was one mother puts the baby down for his nap. And when he wakes up from his nap, another mother is standing there, waiting to pick him up. And it was more of a sort of daily rotation.
NORRIS: All on a very careful schedule, as I understand.
Ms. GRUNWALD: Very careful schedule. I mean, when I first read about this, I thought it was sort of weird and a little creepy. But in fact, at the times in which this took place, everything was considered a possible opportunity for scientific approach, and child care was no exception.
The practice houses really embraced the idea that you could learn mothering the same way you learned cooking or learned chemistry. Everything was learnable, and systems were really important.
NORRIS: There's some clear benefits for the children who went through this practice mothering. Many arrived suffering from malnutrition, and quickly plumped up with good health after their stint in those programs. But were there concerns about this at the time?
Ms. GRUNWALD: I wasnt able to find a whole lot of controversy about this, with the exception of a case that actually made it into "Time" magazine in 1954, that took place at Illinois State. And it involved a baby named David North, for the north house he was living in.
And apparently, the Illinois State Child Welfare Division got wind of the fact that the child was being raised on campus this way, and was extremely disturbed by it. The superintendent of the welfare division said there are just too many people involved in handling the child. And actually, the quote from the article is: Who knows what anxieties there are in a child who's given a bottle in 12 or more pairs of arms?
When I was trying to figure out what might happen to a baby who was raised this way, I talked to various experts, including a couple friends of mine who are psychiatrists. And they told me about attachment disorder and the fact that if a child doesn't form one really tight bond in the first year of life, its sometimes possible - and sometimes happens - that he or she develops attachment disorder.
NORRIS: Any evidence that the actual practice babies develop these problems?
Ms. GRUNWALD: Absolutely none because the practice babies weren't followed as practice babies, much to my dismay. It was really the reason I wanted to write it as fiction because the alternative didn't seem very viable. They were returned to their orphanages, and they were adopted in due course the way most children were adopted - which was, at the time, very anonymously.
And while there's some evidence that some parents really wanted a Domecon baby because he or she had been raised by all these scientific methods, there doesn't seem to have been any way of tracking them or following them.
NORRIS: Now, I understand that youve met some adults who were practice babies years ago, and even some of the mothers who cared for them in these home ec programs - after the publication of your book. How did that come to be, and what did you learn from them?
Ms. GRUNWALD: Well, Facebook is a wonderful thing when it comes to being sought out by people who would not otherwise, you know, find you. And a couple of the mothers got in touch with me, and told me about their experiences.
I haven't met a practice baby, although I was told about a reunion that took place in 1997 in Allentown, between a practice baby who was then 46 years old, and three of the mothers who had raised him in Allentown.
He had found them after much, much, much searching. You know, probably fair to say that he didn't have a lot of memories of his upbringing, but it was still very nice for him, apparently - as it can so often be for an adopted child - to learn a little something more about his first years.
NORRIS: We've been talking with Lisa Grunwald about a practice that's now gone by the wayside, women on college campuses learning how to care for children by watching over so-called practice babies. Lisa Grunwald, thank you very much.
Ms. GRUNWALD: You're so very welcome.
NORRIS: Lisa Grunwald is the author of "The Irresistible Henry House," and you can see photos of practice babies, including the picture that first captured Grunwald's curiosity. That's at npr.org.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Now a puzzling twist in the mystery of a former Iranian general who is believed to have defected to the U.S. or Israel. The man in question is a former high ranking officer in Iran's elite revolutionary guard, who left Iran three years ago and turned up in Istanbul. It's believed he possessed valuable information that the government of Iran would not want shared with the CIA. Late last month, the claim emerged that he had died in an Israeli prison.
But as NPR's Mike Shuster reports, no one's sure what to believe.
MIKE SHUSTER: His name is Ali Reza Asgari, and Iran experts believe he possessed valuable information on Iran's secret nuclear activities and on its relationship with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In late 2006, Asgari left Iran, apparently without authorization, says Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli specialist in Iranian affairs.
Mr. MEIR JAVEDANFAR (Iranian Affairs Specialist): He went to Syria, crossed the border into Turkey, and he disappeared into thin air.
SHUSTER: Asgari apparently put himself into the hands of the CIA or the Mossad, Israel's secret service, says Karim Sadjadpour, who follows Iran for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Mr. KARIM SADJADPOUR (Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): For the CIA or for the Mossad, someone like Ali Reza Asgari would really be a treasure trove of information.
SHUSTER: In the three years since his disappearance, reports have surfaced that Asgari provided information on a secret uranium enrichment site in Iran and that he also provided information that led to the Israeli bombing of a possible nuclear site in Syria in 2007.
Asgari had been for many years the key Iranian liaison with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and it is likely he provided much information on Hezbollah, including on one of its most dangerous characters, Imad Mughniyah. Mughniyah was probably behind a number of devastating terrorist attacks on U.S. targets in Lebanon. He himself was killed by a car bomb two years ago in Syria, and it has been suggested that Asgari provided information that helped his assassins.
Why did Asgari, such a key figure in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, defect? The answer may be simple. When he returned to Iran from assignments in Lebanon, this would've been a decade or so ago, he was thrown in jail, says Karim Sadjadpour, and accused of moral corruption.
Mr. SADJADPOUR: And he was also accused of financial corruption. That he was skimming off the top in various arms deals. And he was brutally tortured when he was in prison.
SHUSTER: According to some who know Asgari, it was after this torture that he decided to break with Iran's government. Little is known of what happened to Asgari after he surfaced briefly in Turkey three years ago. But those following this case assumed he was taken somewhere in the U.S. So it was a surprise when a report posted on the Internet in late December, citing a source in Israel's defense ministry, asserted that Asgari died in an Israeli prison cell, either by his own hand or murdered by the Israelis.
Karim Sadjadpour is skeptical.
Mr. SADJADPOUR: The idea that he would either have committed suicide or died in an Israeli prison doesn't make any sense to me, especially if you're operating under the assumption that this was someone who was extremely disaffected, that he defected on his own, he wasn't kidnapped or lured. And he was a very important source of information. There's no need to kill someone who is openly cooperating and providing you information.
SHUSTER: But this story was taken up by the news media in Iran, and the Iranian government asked the United Nations and the Red Cross to help bring Asgari's body back to Iran.
Meir Javedanfar does not believe Asgari died in Israel, and he has his suspicions about the Iranian government's motives.
Mr. JAVEDANFAR: They are trying to use this story in order to get - even if there's a little bit of clue as to what happened to him, because they're probably worried that if they don't know what happened to Asgari, tomorrow, another official could disappear the way Ali Reza Asgari did. And they would probably want to prevent that by knowing what happened to Mr. Asgari in the first place.
SHUSTER: There have been other cases. One nuclear scientist who defected to the U.S. but then returned last year to Iran, he has reportedly been imprisoned in Tehran. And several individuals connected to Iran's nuclear program have been killed by car bombs over the past year. Asgari's is hardly an isolated case, says Karim Sadjadpour.
Mr. SADJADPOUR: I think that there are dozens of individuals within the Iranian government who are extremely disaffected. And the Iranian government recognizes it's vulnerable to these types of defections.
SHUSTER: Given the difficulties Iran's nuclear program has recently experienced, the clandestine efforts to disrupt the program may just be paying off.
Mike Shuster, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Mustang horses often evoke nostalgia for the American West. But today, the government says there are just too many of them.
For decades, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management has tried to restrict the booming horse population through adoptions and roundups, but adoptions have dropped.
As NPR's Serri Graslie reports, the government is now trying a different tack - birth control.
SERRI GRASLIE: It used to be cowboys who rounded up wild horses. Now, it's helicopters. The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, has used them for years.
This YouTube video shows a low-flying chopper as it chases a herd across rugged terrain in Nevada's Calico Mountains. The horses are funneled into a holding pen where they slow, then stop. Confused by the sudden confinement, they circle, looking for an exit, and kick up snow as they bang against the metal corral.
Roundups like these aren't perfect, but they're necessary according to Tom Gorey, spokesman for the BLM's Wild Horse and Burro Program. He says right now, there are thousands more horses than the range can support.
Mr. TOM GOREY (Spokesman, Wild Horse and Burro Program, Bureau of Land Management): When that happens, we are mandated under the law to remove the excess horses.
GRASLIE: Gorey says the population can double every four years. Now, there are nearly 40,000 wild horses and burros in 10 Western states. The BLM says there's not enough food or water to sustain them, and all those trampling hooves can destroy habitat for other animals.
But activists say roundups are dangerous and can be deadly. Panicked mustangs can trample other, exhausted ones, and worked-up stallions may fight.
Suzanne Roy is with the American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign. She says there's a better way to manage them.
Ms. SUZANNE ROY (Campaign Director, American Wild Horse Preservation Campaign): It would involve shifting resources away from roundup and removal strategies, to management strategies on the range.
GRASLIE: That means removing cattle on the same land, and introducing natural predators. But Tom Gorey, with the BLM, says allowing the horses to roam and reproduce freely isn't smart.
Mr. GOREY: Yes, Mother Nature could regulate the horses through mass starvation and dehydration, but we don't think that's a viable alternative.
GRASLIE: But there is one thing activists and the BLM both agree on, and that's the use of birth control. A vaccine has already been successfully tried by another government agency, the National Park Service.
For 20 years, Allison Turner has managed the wild horses at Assateague Island National Seashore in Maryland. During the winter, the horses here do their best to hide on the small island. We searched for them in sand dunes and salt marshes in her Park Service truck.
Ms. ALLISON TURNER (Biological Technician, Assateague Island National Seashore): This happens all the time.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. TURNER: When you need to - they've been out every day for the last two weeks.
GRASLIE: She's hands-off with the island's 114 horses, and never provides food or vet care. The park wants them to remain as wild as possible.
Finally, Turner spots a pinto in the dunes.
Ms. TURNER: There's two bands of horses here, grazing just at the edge of the shoreline.
GRASLIE: Lately, she's been pregnancy testing the mares. And with horses you can't touch, you have to get creative.
Ms. TURNER: And so what I have to do is find the mare that I want tested, and just wait until she drops a pile. And then I go and collect it.
GRASLIE: Using a plastic bag, she collects the sample, freezes it, and ships it off for testing.
In the spring and summer, Turner uses a modified rifle to shoot the mares with birth-control darts. The vaccine she uses comes from a protein found in pig eggs. When it's injected in any female animal other than the pig, it temporarily blocks fertilization.
Jay Kirkpatrick is a scientist who pioneered use of the vaccine on Assateague Island more than 20 years ago.
Mr. JAY KIRKPATRICK (Director of Science and Conservation Biology, ZooMontana): We treated 26 mares, and we simply darted them. The dart would inject the vaccine, and then the dart pops out. And a year later, not a single foal was born. That's the first time that had ever been done.
GRASLIE: Each mare is allowed to have one offspring during her lifetime.
Mr. KIRKPATRICK: We glibly refer to it as the equal opportunity management plan because every mare has an equal opportunity to make a genetic contribution to the herd.
GRASLIE: Last year, only two foals were born on Assateague. The BLM hopes to see similar results in the west. They'll still round up and remove 10,000 horses this year, but they'll also vaccinate 900.
It will be a challenge, though. They'll have to track down the mares across millions of acres, and that's not the only difficulty. The vaccine is actually making those same mares live longer - up to 10 years longer.
Serri Graslie, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
It's being billed as Conway's big move. We're talking about Conway, the Mastodon skeleton at the Ohio Historical Center in Columbus. Starting today, a team of workers is disassembling Conway and reassembling him in a new position.
And even though he dates from the Pleistocene Epoch, Conway the Mastodon has his own Facebook page. In his most recent post about his big move, Conway says, this is so exciting. I hope I don't go all to pieces. Just kidding.
Well, Bob Glotzhober, is overseeing the mastodon move. He is senior curator of natural history at the Ohio Historical Society. Bob, how's it going today?
Mr. BOB GLOTZHOBER (Senior Curator of Natural History, Ohio Historical Society): It's going pretty well. We've got the four legs already removed. We started at 10 a.m. and we had those done by about 11:30. The left rear leg gave us some tense moments. This skeleton was mounted in 1894. They drilled holes through the bones to run bolts between them to hold it together - something no curator would ever dream of doing today. That's the way it was done back then.
The left leg, the bolt was twisted and you couldn't take it straight out. We had to lower it a little bit and twist it and lower it and twist it. And meanwhile we're holding probably about 200 pounds worth of leg bones while we're trying to do this. And if we get it wrong, the bolt could rub against the bone and fragment or damage the bone. So we had to be very careful.
BLOCK: Well, tell us a bit more about Conway - when he lived, how big he is, anything we should know.
Mr. GLOTZHOBER: When he was alive would have been during the Ice Age, as you mentioned, somewhere between 10 and 18,000 years ago here in Ohio, and he would've been four to five ton and nine to 10 feet tall. So, about the size of a, you know, a modern elephant. Actually, maybe just a little bit smaller than a large African elephant, but in that same range.
BLOCK: And why is he named Conway?
Mr. GLOTZHOBER: He's named Conway because he was discovered by a farmer named Newton Conway, who lived out west of Columbus in Clark County, in Champaign County of Ohio. And he had a wet spot in the field that he wanted to drain so he could plant crops there. And he started digging in the wet spot and he hit bone. And so the mastodon is named in honor of the landowner that discovered him.
BLOCK: Well, Mr. Glotzhober, why does Conway need to be moved? Why are you taking him apart and putting him back together?
Mr. GLOTZHOBER: Well, we put him together where he is right now 17 years ago. And in those days, the entrance to the museum, when you parked in the parking lot you had to go up a long series of stairways into the second floor of the museum and then down a series of stairs with a grand entranceway and he was posed to face that entrance in a very magnificent pose.
A few years later, people started thinking about ADA, you know, taking care of handicapped people and not making them climb steps, and so we redid the entrance. As people come in now, the ground floor entrance, they're greeted by his derriere.
BLOCK: Oh, I see. Not his best side, huh?
Mr. GLOTZHOBER: And many people have said for 14 or 15 years, gee, it would be nice to move him so we're not greeted that way.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. GLOTZHOBER: But because of the degree of difficultly, we held off. Now we're getting ready to enlarge the entranceway even more and make it more visitor friendly and we're also redoing a whole bunch of other exhibits in here. And so we thought, all right, now's the time. We'll get the crew together and we'll take the time and the energy to do it and get it done right.
BLOCK: Well, Bob Glotzhober, thanks for telling us about Conway's big move and good luck with the rest.
Mr. GLOTZHOBER: Thank you.
BLOCK: Bob Glotzhober is senior curator of natural history at the Ohio Historical Society.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Today, President Obama chose a member of Chicago's political dynasty to be the next White House chief of staff: William Daley.
President BARACK OBAMA: He possesses a deep understanding of how jobs are created and how to grow our economy. And needless to say, Bill also has a smidgen of awareness of how our system of government and politics works. You might say it is a genetic trait.
BLOCK: In a moment, we'll hear about the political implications of the president's new choice for chief of staff. First, NPR's Ari Shapiro has this profile.
ARI SHAPIRO: The buzz over William Daley has been all about his connection to business. But long before he worked for JPMorgan Chase or the Chamber of Commerce, Daley was part of the Democratic political machine.
Political scientist Dick Simpson of the University of Illinois describes Daley as a force behind the throne.
Mr. DICK SIMPSON (Political Scientist, University of Illinois): Bill Daley is the youngest of the Daley children after Richard J. Daley, the first mayor, and he is usually considered to be sort of the brains of the family. He's very capable. Often, he has been campaign manager but not candidate.
SHAPIRO: Daley's father and brother each occupied the mayor's office for about a quarter century, but Bill, the youngest Daley, stepped onto the national political scene in the 1990s as commerce secretary to President Bill Clinton. He worked with a Republican-controlled Congress on ratifying the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.
Here, he spoke to the National Press Club about a trade deal with China.
(Soundbite of archived audio)
Secretary WILLIAM DALEY (Commerce Department): I would hope we make this more than the usual sort of inside-the-Beltway trade fight. Let's take it to a higher level.
SHAPIRO: That experience negotiating with Republicans may be helpful as he returns to a Washington where Republicans have gained power.
Even in his speeches as commerce secretary more than a decade ago, you can hear themes that remain true all these years later. Daley is connected to business, and he's unafraid to speak his mind.
Mr. DALEY: When I meet the nation's top business people as I've had the honor over the last year, the bottom line and the truth is, I don't see much diversity. The fact of the matter is I see nine out of 10 or beyond that are white males.
SHAPIRO: When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, Daley left his Cabinet post to chair the campaign. On a rainy November night in Tennessee, it was Daley who made the dramatic announcement that Gore was withdrawing his concession.
(Soundbite of archived audio)
Mr. DALEY: But this race is simply too close to call. And until the results - the recount is concluded and the results in Florida become official, our campaign continues.
(Soundbite of cheering)
SHAPIRO: Gore ultimately conceded, and Daley went to the private sector. For the last several years, he has worked at the financial giant JPMorgan and Chase.
Douglas Elliott of the Brookings Institution was at JPMorgan for many years, and he says Daley was known for his ability to bridge opposing views and negotiate a solution. It's a skill that will be vital in this new job.
Mr. DOUGLAS ELLIOTT (Fellow, Brookings Institution): In the chief of staff's position, you're constantly trying to bring people together who have different viewpoints and perhaps different interests. Ideally, you are able to reach conclusions in that group without having to bring the president into it.
SHAPIRO: At the same time, some of the same attributes that centrists view as strength, raise warning flags for activists on the left. Liberals have been afraid that President Obama bows too quickly to Republicans and to Wall Street. Daley will need to deal with their feeling that his appointment confirms their fears.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
The digital divide has created a chasm between the nation's two biggest bookstore chains. While Borders is trying to hold off bankruptcy, Barnes and Noble today announced its best holiday sales season in more than a decade.
The two superstores have been fending off competition from online book sellers and the e-book but in very different ways.
As NPR's Lynn Neary reports, Barnes and Noble put its money on a digital device with a catchy name - the NOOK.
LYNN NEARY: Thrilled was the word Barnes and Noble chief financial officer Joseph Lombardi used to describe the mood at his company today. Holiday sales at BarnesandNoble.com were up 78 percent over last year. Store sales increased by almost 10 percent.
And while sales of hardcover books were better than expected, Lombardi made it clear that Barnes and Noble's popular e-readers, The NOOK and the NOOKcolor were behind the good news.
Mr. JOSEPH LOMBARDI (Chief Financial Officer, Barnes and Nobel): We made a big decision to invest a lot of money this year in developing, you know, the hardware and software that has become NOOK, and we think we've done the right thing. And I think that's been the most satisfying thing coming out of this holiday for our company.
Mr. JAMES McQUIVEY (Analyst, Forrester Research): The NOOK is a tide that rises all boats.
NEARY: James McQuivey is an analyst at Forrester Research. McQuivey says the NOOK itself is a popular reading device, but it is also sold in the chain's stores. And that, says McQuivey, gives Barnes and Noble an added advantage.
Mr. McQUIVEY: Because people buy the NOOK at retail, and then they go and buy digital books, but because they're in the retail location, they might pick something else up while they're there. So the good residual feeling that Barnes and Noble has after Q4 last year is all because of the foot traffic that the NOOK drove. That's their salvation right now.
NEARY: While Barnes and Noble was developing the Nook, Borders was already having financial problems, leaving it ill-prepared to make the investments needed to meet the challenges of the digital age.
Michael Norris, an analyst with Simba Information, says some of Borders' problems can be traced back to its leadership.
Mr. MICHAEL NORRIS (Analyst, Simba Information): Because they've actually been through quite a few executives over just a short number of years, and every time there's been an executive change, it basically slows the company down, and it really just hasn't been as nimble or agile as it should have been.
NEARY: And, Norris says, even before the onset of e-books, Borders made a crucial error.
Mr. NORRIS: For a lot of years, Borders actually relied on Amazon to handle their e-commerce function. So if you were to buy a book from Borders, you would actually be buying it from Amazon, and Amazon would pay Borders a commission.
So Borders didn't have a lot of experience developing its own infrastructure, so compared to Barnes and Noble, Borders just really got off to a late start making the online business and the offline superstore business work as one.
NEARY: As 2010 drew to a close, Borders announced that it was looking for new financing and delaying payments to some of its vendors. Now, says James McQuivey it's possible that Borders will go under.
Mr. McQUIVEY: There's always a possibility of a resurrection here, but at this point, it looks like Borders is probably the Tower Records of books. It's probably the book company most likely to go under, and to be that big announcement that causes everyone to finally realize that digital has won the battle.
NEARY: That's not to say Barnes and Noble doesn't still face its own challenges. McQuivey says once the digital device market is saturated, a book store will still have to sell books.
Mr. McQUIVEY: That's the battle for the next couple of years, is how do I get you to buy not just the bestseller on your NOOK but to buy a whole bunch of older titles that you weren't even aware of and weren't even thinking about. And that's what Netflix has done in video, it's what Amazon appears to be doing quite well in the Kindle world, and Barnes and Noble needs to do the same with NOOK.
NEARY: And while Barnes and Noble may lose one of its major competitors, it still has another. Amazon and its popular e-book reader the Kindle still dominate the e-book and online market.
Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
We're going to spend the next few minutes now on the Constitution. Republicans built their new majority in the House of Representatives thanks, in large part, to the passion of the Tea Party movement. And one of the central tenants of that movement is that the government has lost its way, and must return to the country's founding principles.
BLOCK: To underline that idea, the new House Republican leadership has mandated that every bill must include a statement citing its specific constitutional authority. More on that in just a moment.
But first, in a symbolic move today, House members from both parties read the Constitution aloud on the House floor. New House Speaker John Boehner started things off.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio): We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union...
NORRIS: And 84 minutes later, Tennessee Republican Stephen Fincher finished with Amendment 27.
Representative STEPHEN FINCHER (Republican, Tennessee): No law varying the compensation for the services of the senators and representatives shall take effect until an election of representatives shall have intervened.
BLOCK: In between, we were reminded that even the United States of America comes with operating instructions - a document that allows for change when necessary. Here's Democrat John Lewis of Georgia.
Representative JOHN LEWIS (Democrat, Georgia): Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
NORRIS: Today's reading did not include the repealed 18th Amendment, which banned the sale, manufacture and transportation of alcohol. Also, there was no mention from Article 1, Section 2 of non-free people - presumably slaves -counting as three-fifths of a person.
While the reading was every bit as predictable and dry as you might expect, there was one lively moment as New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone read Article 2, Section 1.
Representative FRANK PALLONE (Democrat, New Jersey): No person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to be the office of president. Neither shall...
Unidentified Woman: Except Obama. Except Obama.
NORRIS: That's a woman shouting from the public gallery: Except Obama. In accordance with the law, she was placed under arrest.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
As we mentioned, every piece of legislation introduced in the House, in this new session of Congress, will need to spell out precisely where in the Constitution the authority for that bill is found - where in those seven original articles and 27 amendments.
I'm joined by constitutional law professor Michael Gerhardt, who teaches at the University of North Carolina School of Law. Welcome to the program.
Professor MICHAEL GERHARDT (Law, University of North Carolina): Hi, thanks for having me.
BLOCK: Now, professor Gerhardt, what do you make of this new rule requiring members to state specifically where in the Constitution they're getting their authority for their bills?
Prof. GERHARDT: I think the new rule cannot hurt, but I think it's important to understand that members of Congress do take the Constitution into account whenever they consider whether or not to vote for a law, and they also take into account how they draft the law.
I also think the movement toward this rule is based a little bit on a false premise - that is, the expectation or assumption that members of Congress do not take the Constitution into account when they vote on a law. But in fact, they do every single day. And most laws, in fact, expressly reference the Constitution, and it's referenced in debates all the time on the floor of the House.
BLOCK: This new rule, though, says they need to have specific language - a separate sheet, I believe - that's filed with each bill, saying: Here's where, in the Constitution, it says that we can do this. Prof. GERHARDT: I understand. And in fact, most laws have what is called a jurisdictional statement or finding - that reference the specific sections of the Constitution that are the authority of the law. Also, House committees have a requirement that their reports contain the specific constitutional authorizations for the laws that they're considering.
BLOCK: OK. Well, somebody who knows the Constitution as well as you do, which parts do you figure are going to be getting the greatest workout under this new rule?
Prof. GERHARDT: There's no question that the part of the Constitution that will get the greatest workout is the interstate commerce clause. Most federal laws have, as the source of their authority, the specific authority of Congress to regulate interstate commerce among the states.
BLOCK: OK. Well, let's go through some specific legislative examples and start with the health-care overhaul law that was passed last year - which did, in fact, go back to the commerce clause. That's what's been fought about in court already.
Prof. GERHARDT: That is correct. It was part of the debates. It is referenced explicitly in the law. And there's no question at all, among any of the members of Congress, that in voting on it, it was premised, in part, on the interstate commerce clause.
BLOCK: The Lilly Ledbetter Act - this was a fair pay act that was enacted back in 2009. Where in the Constitution would you find the authority for that?
Prof. GERHARDT: That would arise, among other places, from the interstate commerce clause.
BLOCK: Still back in Article 1, Section 8. The Dream Act, this was defeated in December. It would have provided a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrant students. What about that one?
Prof. GERHARDT: Congress has a specific power under Section 8 to establish a uniform rule of naturalization. So that would be the specific authority for that act.
BLOCK: OK. Article 1, Section 8, seems to be you could put some boiler plate on that statement, maybe, and file it with every piece of legislation that's introduced.
Prof. GERHARDT: And that will likely happen. But again, I would emphasize that every member of Congress, every single day that they happen to be there, do take the Constitution into account. I don't think any member of Congress will ever vote for a law that he or she thinks is unconstitutional. In fact, I know they would not.
BLOCK: There is also some pretty broad language at the end of Section 8, talking about Congress being able to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying out its powers. Could you use that pretty broadly, do you think?
Prof. GERHARDT: You can, but that is generally understood not to be the source of an independent authority for Congress to enact a law but, in fact, that authority exists to be used in conjunction with other authorities - such as the interstate commerce clause - to enact a law.
BLOCK: Can you think, professor Gerhardt, of legislation that's been either introduced or maybe passed that really, you wouldn't be able to specifically find a grounding for somewhere in the Constitution?
Prof. GERHARDT: I think the short answer to that question is no. Laws, once they're enacted, have to go through a large number of what we call veto gates. That is to say, once a law gets enacted, it generally means that there's been a great deal of deliberation over it, and a great deal of opportunity for people to consider the source of constitutional authority for that law.
BLOCK: Plenty of laws, though, that are found unconstitutional later by the courts.
Prof. GERHARDT: That is right. But it doesn't mean that Congress was acting in bad faith when it passed the law. It meant that the courts came up with a different interpretation of the authority of Congress. And I think that's a big part of what's going on right now. Part of what is driving this current movement, on the part of the Republicans, has to do less with fidelity to the Constitution but rather with, how do people interpret the document?
BLOCK: In other words, the old argument over whether the Constitution should be interpreted as through the original intent of the framers, or as a document whose meaning evolves over time.
Prof. GERHARDT: That is correct. But of course, there are other ways to think about the debate as well. To what extent do we care about precedent? To what extent do we care about historical practices? To what extent do we care about the consequences of the law's enactment with respect to the Constitution? There are a lot of different considerations that one has to, in fact, care about when one considers the constitutionality of a law.
BLOCK: Well, Professor Gerhardt, thank you very much for talking with us.
Prof. GERHARDT: Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure.
BLOCK: Michael Gerhardt is a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, winner of the 2005 Man Booker International Prize, has been slowly building a reputation here in the U.S. With the publication of his latest novel, "The Accident," Alan Cheuse says Kadare will be adding to his American fan base.
ALAN CHEUSE: Kadare opens the novel with a vivid description of a roadway mishap in which a taxi carrying a couple who find themselves at the end of a long love affair skids off the road and the passengers die.
He casts the rest of the book as an investigation into the incident. We hear from various interested parties, private and public, and the story of these lovers opens up into a full-blown portrait of their affair, which they carried on in a number of European capitals, against the backdrop of European politics and diplomacy.
Everywhere in the world, events flow noisily on the surface, Kadare writes, while their deep currents pull silently, but nowhere is this contrast so striking as in the Balkans.
Kadare dives deep into the pulling currents of love and death, carrying us down with him into a world which ranges, on the one hand, from dirty limericks about Bill Clintons sexual peccadilloes to profundities about the relation of stories and death.
Anyone who has ever suffered through a love affair or wondered about other people caught up in such torments will find this brief novel essential reading.
BLOCK: "The Accident" is written by Ismail Kadare and translated by John Hodgson(ph). Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Of all the appointments the president makes, none has more immediate effect on the administration's day-to-day success or failure than the White House chief of staff. And the choice of William Daley says a lot about what President Obama expects to be dealing with in the next two years.
NPR national political correspondent Mara Liasson has spent the day absorbing the atmosphere at the White House, and she joins us now from there.
Mara, so what does tell us about what the president is expecting?
MARA LIASSON: It tells us that he wants to move to the center. It tells us he wants to reach out to the business community. As you heard, William Daley is an executive at JPMorgan Chase. That would make him one of those fat-cat investment bankers that the president once famously criticized.
He's also fresh blood. He's an outsider. The president has decided he needs some new perspectives. He's reached out to somebody who has a lot of experience, kind of a Howard Baker-type and a former Clinton hand, not unlike his new choice for budget director, Jack Lew.
So it shows you that the president wants to get ready to deal with the new reality of divided government and run for re-election at the same time, and he chose someone who's - can fit both of those needs.
NORRIS: An outsider with inside experience, and there's an interesting symmetry here, Mara, the president's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, left to run for mayor of Chicago. Now, his successor's name is almost synonymous with that office, at least his last name, Daley. What's the meaning to be found in that?
LIASSON: Well, Chicago is the president's political touchstone. It's also a pretty good training for the rough and tumble politics in Washington. But it also tells you that even though William Daley is not really in the inner sanctum of Obama advisers - that's a very tightly-held, tiny little circle of people - he is in one of the inner most rings, you could say, of the Obama universe.
He's very close with David Axelrod, who's the president's top political adviser, who is about to leave the White House to go back to Chicago to set up the re-election effort. And William Daley, Bill Daley, is going to be able to coordinate with David Axelrod very well as the White House does something that's pretty unusual, which is run a re-election campaign not from Washington.
NORRIS: Hmm. It's clear that Rahm Emanuel really helped defined the first two years of this presidency with his leadership style. How will William Daley be different?
LIASSON: Well, you know, Rahm Emanuel's job was to legislate. I think Bill Daley's job will be to negotiate. Rahm Emanuel had deep, strong ties to the Democratic House leadership. He was once part of it. His job was to get Democrats on board since no Republicans were going to help -or very few Republicans were going to help President Obama pass his agenda.
Bill Daley's job is to reach across the aisle. He's also going to be a surrogate for the president. I think you're going to see him out in public a lot in a way that Rahm Emanuel wasn't.
One of the striking things about this administration is how few high-level surrogates the White House has had. President Obama has had to do it almost all by himself. But I think you're going to see Bill Daley out more in public.
NORRIS: We've heard a lot of rumors about this appointment. Now that it's official, what's been the reaction outside the White House?
LIASSON: Well, as you could expect, centrist, Democratic groups have responded with praise. The Chamber of Commerce, with which Bill Daley once worked, who also was one of the president's most powerful opponents, reacted with praise. Liberal groups have been disappointed and have criticized the decision. But Howard Dean, who's really a hero to liberals in the Democratic Party, thought it was a very smart move.
NORRIS: Beyond the chief of staff, we've been hearing about other big changes expected and an overall staff shakeup. What kinds of changes are ahead? What are we expecting?
LIASSON: Well, tomorrow, you're likely to hear that Gene Sperling, who's a Treasury Department official, also a former Clinton aide, is going to be made the head of the National Economic Council. He takes the place of Larry Summers, who went back to Harvard. I think that you'll also see David Plouffe. He's already been announced, but he will arrive at the White House next week to fill the job that David Axelrod has been doing. As I said, Axelrod will go back to Chicago.
And then, in one of the highest-profile decisions, at some point in the next few weeks, we should find out who's going to be the new press secretary. Robert Gibbs announced yesterday that he no longer is going to brief from the podium. He's going to the private sector to be a paid consultant to the Obama campaign.
And they haven't decided yet who the new press secretary will be. They've widened the search. It's not just inside the White House. They're looking outside. So this is all part of the president revamping his operation to deal with divided government and to get ready for re-election.
NORRIS: Always good to talk to you, Mara.
LIASSON: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: That's NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Now, to a story that hits us close to home here. NPR's top news executive, Senior Vice President Ellen Weiss, submitted her resignation today. It comes in the wake of an external review of the firing of former senior news analyst Juan Williams.
As NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik reports, NPR's board of directors also announced it would pursue additional reforms.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: The report concluded today was conducted by the law firm Weil, Gotshal, Manges. It determined that the termination of Juan Williams back in October was perfectly legal, that he was given adequate notice and that NPR donors and interest groups played no part in influencing the decision in any way.
VIVIAN SCHILLER: This has been a very difficult episode for everyone involved at NPR and at our public radio stations, and I regret the impact it's had.
FOLKENFLIK: That's NPR's president and CEO, Vivian Schiller.
SCHILLER: We are looking to accept the board's direction in terms of the recommendations, and many of those are well underway, and they will make NPR even better than it is today.
FOLKENFLIK: The fallout from the incident was unexpected and severe.
Weiss joined NPR in 1982 and rose through the ranks, holding a variety of key positions, such as executive producer of ALL THINGS CONSIDERED and national editor.
She is credited by many for helping to guide the network through an era of wrenching changes, but the way she dismissed Williams, by phone, became a flashpoint in the debate. Dave Edwards is the chairman of NPR's board of directors.
DAVE EDWARDS: I think we all know that the termination was not handled in the best possible way. Management has previously acknowledged that fact. They've admitted the fact that it was done hastily. And I think we all know that that contributed to a lot of the misunderstandings and criticisms of NPR because of it.
FOLKENFLIK: The episode occurred back in October. Williams appeared on the Fox News Channel, where he was also a paid commentator, and spoke of his fears whenever he saw fellow airline passengers dressed in what he called Muslim garb.
His comments sparked some criticism from Muslims and liberal advocacy groups, who called that racial profiling.
But the termination of Williams's contract quickly became a political firestorm. Conservative commentators called foul, as did some journalists. Republican lawmakers threatened to target funding for public broadcasters, an act that would threaten NPR member stations far more directly than NPR.
Nowhere was the criticism stronger than on Fox News, where opinion hosts made it a cause. Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes gave Williams a three-year, $2 million contract and then called NPR executives Nazis.
Williams declined to comment for this story but spoke to Fox's Megyn Kelly earlier this afternoon, after Weiss's resignation was announced.
Mr. JUAN WILLIAMS (Fox News): I think everybody knows the real story here, and the real story is that you can't go around, you know, treating people like trash and pretending that anybody who has a different point of view is illegitimate.
FOLKENFLIK: Several conservative critics argued the network had been hypocritical, pointing to controversial remarks by other NPR news figures in other outlets. The network says it will review policies about what is appropriate for NPR news staffers to say on other platforms or media outlets with an eye to enforcing them consistently.
NPR's CEO, Schiller, had also come under attack for her own verbal gaffe when she said that Williams, as a journalist, should not be voicing his views but suggesting he should confide them privately, perhaps to a publicist or a psychiatrist. Fox hosts and anchors portrayed that as an effort to paint Williams as in need of psychiatric help.
The NPR board publicly rebuked Schiller, too, saying it backed her but was withholding her bonus for last year. Schiller says she respects the board's take and has apologized for her remark.
As for Ellen Weiss, when asked whether her departure was voluntary, she told me, quote, "Let's just say I made a choice, and I chose to resign."
David Folkenflik, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates did something of the impossible today: He announced cuts to the defense budget, and at the same time, though, he unveiled a plan to grow military spending. NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman has been crunching the numbers and has this explanation for the Pentagon's accounting magic.
TOM BOWMAN: Secretary Gates called his budget the minimum level of defense spending that's necessary, given what he called the many security challenges around the world. But he made pains to say that not every program can be spared cutbacks.
Secretary ROBERT GATES (Department of Defense): We must come to realize that not every defense program is necessary, not every defense dollar is sacred and well-spent and that more of nearly everything is simply not sustainable.
BOWMAN: What's not sustainable? The Marine Corps' troubled and expensive amphibious troop carrier - Gates cut that. He's also delaying a Marine version of a warplane called the Joint Strike Fighter.
But here's the catch: The Marines, like the other military services, will be able to plow a lot of those savings into other programs. The Marines will upgrade their current amphibious vehicle.
Gates found $100 billion in Pentagon savings over five years but allowed the Pentagon to keep that money. Kori Schake served on the National Security Council under President George W. Bush and sees Gates as something of a magician.
Ms. KORI SCHAKE (Former Bush Administration Official): My sense is that he's actually pulled off one of the great Houdini acts of our time because everybody's talking about this $100 billion-cut in the budget. What Gates has actually done is moved $100 billion from his existing budget to his existing budget.
BOWMAN: Retired Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming wanted Gates to make real cuts. Simpson was part of a presidential commission that proposed 100 billion cuts in one year alone and would use it to cut the deficit, not let the Pentagon pocket its savings.
Mr. ALAN SIMPSON (Former Republican Senator, Wyoming): He's a wonderful guy, and I've known him a long time, and to just reprogram and move stuff around inside as a saving, it just - it won't get us anywhere.
BOWMAN: Meaning it won't help cut the country's massive debt. That's been the focus of the tea party movement and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Gates says he's ready for that discussion.
Sec. GATES: My view is that we've got it about right, and there clearly will be a lot of debate on the Hill about this.
BOWMAN: The incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says Republicans plan on looking to the Pentagon for possible cuts.
Representative ERIC CANTOR (Republican, Virginia): The Republican majority, as you would expect, is going to be a majority focused on national security, as far as defense is concerned. But everybody is going to have to do more with less.
BOWMAN: Gates has heard the call for more cuts. So today Gates proposed to trim $78 billion over five years beginning in 2013. These cuts, if they ever happen, would not just be shifted to other defense programs.
How would Gates hit that target? A lot of that comes from what he calls overhead reductions in efficiencies. That includes everything from cutting the number of admirals and generals to civilian salary freezes, also cutting the Army and Marine Corps by as many as 50,000 troops. That makes sense to Carl Conetta, a defense analyst at the Project on Defense Alternatives. Troop cuts are something he and others have called for.
Mr. CARL CONETTA (Analyst, Project on Defense Alternatives): Some key ideas were rolling back the size of the Army and the Marine Corps as the wars wind down.
BOWMAN: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gates says don't look for those troop cuts until the end of 2014.
Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The proposed cuts in U.S. defense spending come just as concerns about China's military program are growing. The latest example: a new Chinese fighter jet with stealth characteristics, meaning it can't be seen on radar.
It's still in development, but pictures of the aircraft on a runway appeared last week in Chinese media. U.S. experts aren't sure how soon the plane will be operational, but they say it shows China is moving quickly to modernize its military.
NPR's Tom Gjelten reports.
TOM GJELTEN: There are a lot of U.S. security experts who follow China's military development, and in their world, it was no secret China was working on a stealthy aircraft. Some pictures had even leaked out.
But Roger Cliff of the RAND Corporation says those early images didn't reveal anything all that impressive.
Mr. ROGER CLIFF (RAND Corporation): They appeared to be versions of aircraft that were already in service that had been modified to try to make them stealthy and so on. But the newest pictures show an entirely new design that looks very advanced.
GJELTEN: The aircraft shown on a Chinese runway last week looks something like an American F-22, the most advanced stealth fighter in the world today. It has the same two angled tailfins, for example. It can carry missiles. It has twin engines.
Richard Fisher, at the International Strategy and Assessment Center is one of many China analysts impressed by this new Chinese fighter.
Mr. RICHARD FISHER (International Strategy and Assessment Center): It has, in my opinion, the potential to have a performance that could be superior to the American F-22.
GJELTEN: You said superior.
Mr. FISHER: Yes.
GJELTEN: That would be if it could fly faster or farther than the F-22 with its same stealth capability. But no one knows that for sure yet.
Pentagon officials point out the new Chinese fighter is years from being operational. And Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation says the news of an advanced Chinese stealth aircraft should not be coming as a surprise.
Mr. DEAN CHENG (Heritage Foundation) The Chinese air force is not the obsolete air force it was in the '50s and '60s. That model has been jettisoned.
What should be of concern is when we contrast where the Chinese are versus very confident assertions by various folks that the Chinese were a decade away.
GJELTEN: A decade away. U.S. intelligence officials now think the new Chinese fighter could be in use by 2018. And Roger Cliff says it's a surprise to him and other analysts that the Chinese have developed a fighter with a long-range capability. That alone, he says, is cause for concern to U.S. air commanders.
Mr. CLIFF: This is a plane that's going to be able to fly far enough to actually threaten those aerial refueling aircraft, signals-intelligence aircraft, radar aircraft and so on that are all essential to our ability to actually use air-combat power in a conflict.
GJELTEN: And this new aircraft is just the latest example of the Chinese military advances. They're due to launch an aircraft carrier of their own later this year. Plus, there's a new Chinese missile that could hit an American aircraft carrier.
And Chinese officials are calling for sharp increases in military spending and making more aggressive statements about their military intentions.
James Mulvenon, a China expert at the Defense Group consultancy, says there's an effort here to send the United States a message. Defense Secretary Robert Gates heads to Beijing next week, and Chinese president Hu Jintao comes here later this month.
Mr. JAMES MULVENON (China Expert, Defense Group): Recent disclosures of photographs, I think, fall in that pattern and are meant to set a certain tone, which is to say that China is not easy to push around and that the United States needs to pay greater attention to China's statements about its view of its national interests and to pay greater respect to those.
GJELTEN: China's military modernization program still leaves it years behind U.S. capabilities, but not that many years. The security experts following these developments say China will be rivaling the United States, at least in Asia, as soon as 2020.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
New Yorkers have had a tough few weeks getting around. First, there was the massive snow, then the sidewalks overflowed with garbage, and today it was camels. It's Three Kings Day, the traditional celebration of the day the magi, as the story goes, came to visit Baby Jesus. In New York, it's a big celebration in the Puerto Rican community.
Here's NPR's Robert Smith.
ROBERT SMITH: In East Harlem, everyone was king for a day. There were old wise men in robes of flowing sequins, kids with handmade crowns, and then there's Brian Foley(ph), who was hired to be one of the three kings on stilts.
Mr. BRIAN FOLEY: Well, I know that one of them has the gift of gold, one of them has the gift of Frankenstein, and one has the gift of mirth.
SMITH: That's frankincense.
Mr. FOLEY: And the other one has mirth. So I'm either going to walk around like a green monster with bolts sticking out of my neck, or I will try to make people laugh. And that's the mirth, as far as I can tell. Gold, I'm a starving artist in New York City. I'll do the best I can.
SMITH: Okay. Not everyone is clear on the biblical story. But there is one part of the legend that no Three Kings parade can do without - the camels.
Jose Luis Ortiz(ph), a drummer in the parade, explains that on the night before Three Kings, children leave a little gift for the dromedaries.
Mr. JOSE LUIS ORTIZ: You put some grass in a little box underneath your bed and, you know, and tomorrow, you wake up, and there will be a gift.
SMITH: Because the grass attracted the camels and the Three Kings?
Mr. ORTIZ: Yes. It's symbolic.
SMITH: Now, the problem is this is New York City after a huge snowstorm. Where do you find grass right now?
Mr. ORTIZ: Somehow, it's there. Yeah, it's a miracle.
SMITH: Just like the miracle of real live camels showing up in the middle of Harlem in the dead of winter.
Unidentified Child: Real camels. Oh, my gosh. Real camels. You've got to be kidding me. He's huge.
SMITH: The kids go crazy when the camels lumber out onto Lexington Avenue.
Amanda Brook pulls them on a rope. She works at Dawn Animal Agency, a sanctuary in upstate New York with 20 camels. But only certain ones get the role of a lifetime.
Ms. AMANDA BROOK (Dawn Animal Agency): They have to be able to be around all the people, all the noise and not be bothered by it. You know, we don't want to bring them if they're stressed or mind anything.
SMITH: Well, this must be their biggest day of the year. There's not too many camel-centric holidays.
Ms. BROOK: This is - they do the Christmas (unintelligible) in the Music Hall as well, so...
SMITH: Ooh, that's pretty big.
Ms. BROOK: Yeah. So they have some good gigs this year.
SMITH: The lucky beasts are Nina, Carol and Ted, and they seem immune to the kids rushing up and the cameras flashing in their faces and the rather thick smell of incense from the lead Three Kings. But in this snow-weary city, there is something the camels have to avoid - the white stuff.
Ms. BROOK: Yeah, we don't walk them over snow just in case it's icy underneath and they slip because they have like hard (unintelligible). It's really hard leather. It's not like a hoof. So it's very slippery if it was ice.
SMITH: There are politicians at this parade. There are celebrities. But only the camels have a security detail. Five young men dressed all in black like Secret Service agents scan the crowd for danger. Is anyone flashing a peanut? Is that young child about to move to grab those bony legs?
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
SMITH: The only people who know how to keep a respectful distance are the kings themselves. Some have done this parade for years, and they have stories of crowns being nibbled by the camels, of being soaked by great streams of urine.
Unidentified Man #2: You have to step back, all right, so that they can get the animals in.
SMITH: The NYPD comes in to help at the end of the parade. As the camels are whisked away from the paparazzi, Amanda Brook closes the door to the trailer.
Now that the parade is over, what are the camels going to do for the next 11 months?
Ms. BROOK: Oh, they're going to relax at the farm and enjoy their time-out.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SMITH: And wait for Christmas.
Ms. BROOK: Exactly. Occasional Moroccan-theme birthday party or wedding thrown in there and they're done.
SMITH: A well-earned vacation.
Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The debate over the health-care overhaul is back in full force. House Republicans will take a preliminary vote tomorrow on a bill called Repealing the Job-Killing Health-Care Law Act. That's the actual title of that bill.
So we thought we'd bring back one of our more popular features from last year's health debate, and attempt to determine the accuracy of some of the claims each side is making. And we're going to be hearing from both Democrats and Republicans.
And joining me here in the studio, as always, is NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner.
And Julie, let's get right to it.
JULIE ROVNER: OK.
NORRIS: This morning, on NBC's "Today Show," Minnesota Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann had this to say about the health law.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Today Show")
Representative MICHELE BACHMANN (Republican, Minnesota): We found out that the bill is costing far more than what we were told it was going to, and it's now working to increase people's health-care premiums, their private premiums, at astounding rates.
NORRIS: Now, Julie, how accurate are those claims?
ROVNER: Well, not all that accurate. As to the cost, the Congressional Budget Office just this morning released its estimate of how much it would add to the deficit to repeal the health law. Remember, the CBO said last year that the law would actually save money over time - not just over 10 years but over the decade following that.
It now says that repealing the health law would add about $230 billion to the deficit over the next decade, and it would add even more in the decade following. As to raising premiums, yes, premiums are going up, but it's mostly not because of the health law. The things that that law is supposed to do to slow down premium increases haven't actually kicked in yet. So last year's premium increases mostly would have happened anyway - with the law or without it.
NORRIS: Let's move on, Julie. We're also hearing a familiar refrain from Republicans about the bill. Here's new Majority Leader Eric Cantor, speaking to reporters on Tuesday.
Representative ERIC CANTOR (Republican, Virginia; House Majority Leader): It is a job-killing health-care bill that spends money we don't have. And we need to repeal it, and replace it with the kind of health care that most Americans expect.
NORRIS: Julie, I want to focus on the first thing he said. Is there any evidence that the law is actually job-killing?
ROVNER: Well, certainly not now. Mostly, what the Republicans are talking about is what will happen starting in 2014, and that's when these requirements for employers kick in. There are some requirements -indeed, if you have more than 50 employees, that - not that you have to offer insurance, but if you do not offer insurance and your employees go to these new exchanges and get insurance, then employers will have to pay a penalty.
And so they say that that will kill jobs. Now, there are other economists who say that if the law works as intended and at least stabilizes how much premiums cost, that it could, in fact, help the economy. And it could add jobs.
NORRIS: Let's stay at that Tuesday press conference for just a minute. Cantor also said this about the law's popularity.
Rep. CANTOR: This is a bill that most Americans outside the Beltway - and certainly, most people inside the Beltway - know is something that is rejected by the majority of the people.
NORRIS: Has it been rejected by the majority of the people?
ROVNER: Well, it's certainly being rejected by a majority of Republicans. Most polls put it at about nine to one, with Republicans against it.
But when you look at polls of voters at large, it's still pretty well split. And in fact, among those who say they oppose the law, a certain portion of them say they oppose the law because they're - that it didn't go far enough.
So for him to say that it's been rejected by a majority of the American people, that may be a little bit of an overstatement.
NORRIS: Now, you know, when we talk about the law's popularity, Democrats have also made statements that, I guess, we should assess as well.
Along those lines, here's something House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Robert Siegel earlier this week.
Representative NANCY PELOSI (Democrat, California; House Minority Leader): Individual parts of the bill are very popular: pre-existing conditions, no cap on coverage, caps on premiums, having your child stay on your policy until he or she is 26 years old, initiatives for America's seniors.
NORRIS: So what she's trying to say is when you pull out certain portions of the bill, that favorability numbers go up. Is that correct?
ROVNER: That's absolutely true. And that's been true from the beginning. You ask people, as a whole, do you like or dislike this law? You get, as I said, about 50-50, or just a few more people say they don't like it. But when you take out those component parts, then favorability goes way, way up.
NORRIS: Democrats have been talking in sweeping ways about what might happen if the law actually were repealed.
Here's Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
Representative DEBBIE WASSERMAN-SCHULTZ (Democrat, Florida): Plain and simple, repealing health-care reform would hurt millions of Americans.
NORRIS: Millions - is that correct?
ROVNER: Well, yes. But probably not as many millions as some of these statements would have you believe. Most of the benefits of the law have not taken effect yet, but some have. Just over a million young adults under age 26 have gotten back on their parents' health plans. So they'd lose that coverage if the law was repealed.
About 3 million seniors fall into what's known as the doughnut hole in Medicare drug coverage. They spend just enough that they don't get any more coverage. That's slowly being filled. So if this law was repealed, they would lose that financial help as well.
Now, there are a lot of other, smaller benefits that affect many more millions of people. But they're things that you wouldn't necessarily see right away, like no lifetime limits on insurance policies. So unless you were to actually hit that, you wouldn't know that you had it. So they're not as immediate, and you wouldn't necessarily see those.
NORRIS: Julie thanks, as always, for listening carefully for accuracy.
ROVNER: My pleasure.
NORRIS: That's NPR's health policy correspondent Julie Rovner.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And Lauren Redniss, you met the Curies' granddaughter in Paris when you were working on this book. She gave you a kind of warning. What did she tell you?
LAUREN REDNISS: So while I very deliberately did fall into the first trap and emphasized in some ways the fairy tale aspects of their story, I tried to highlight Pierre's work.
BLOCK: Well, let's talk about that first trap that you deliberately or willfully blundered into, you said, in this book. Marie Curie is a young scientist from Poland, she comes to Paris, she meets Pierre Curie, and they become inseparable. And that to you - you heighten the romantic parts of this. They bicycle on their honeymoon.
REDNISS: Yes. It was really important to me to not separate the human element from the scientific developments.
BLOCK: Did it strike you right away that the Curies' story was a visual one. Was it something you, as an artist, wanted to tell not just in words but in pictures?
REDNISS: It presented a really interesting challenge because it's largely about invisible forces. It's about love. It's about radioactivity, these things that we can't see, and so to make a visual book about that was an intriguing challenge for me.
BLOCK: Let's talk about that challenge and how you solved it because the images in this book are sort of luminous. They're vibrating with color. What did you do?
REDNISS: And a lot of the images in the book are blue. They're not glowing, but they sort of look like they're lifting off the page a little bit.
REDNISS: Right. That blue has sort of a twilight quality. And because you are getting a negative of the drawings, they often have a white line. And that to me had this certain kind of glow that reflected what Marie Curie called radium's spontaneous luminosity.
BLOCK: Hmm. You have a section here where you talk about Marie Curie keeping a vial, a tube of radium, right next to her pillow; Pierre Curie strapping some onto his arm and watching a lesion develop on his arm, but he's not horrified by it. He's fascinated. He's delighted for some reason. Why?
REDNISS: I think they saw these effects with a scientific detachment. And they - as you describe, when Pierre put that vial of radium against his arm and saw the lesion develop, they understood that if radium could destroy healthy tissue, it may also be able to destroy diseased tissue, and they began to develop cancer treatments.
BLOCK: You describe what happens after the Curies discover radium. It becomes an instant commercial hit. People think it's a wonder drug, and you have a long list of products that were marketed around radium. What were some of them?
REDNISS: There was toothpaste; there were pillows; there was chocolates - all kinds of medicines and household products and just about anything you could imagine to give your body and mind a healthy glow.
BLOCK: Were these things that were actually put on the market with radium, or were these just ideas?
REDNISS: Some were, and some weren't. In some cases, there was radium in the products, and in other cases it was more along the lines of something like an American Express gold card where, you know, there isn't really gold in that card, but radium was used as a branding and selling point.
BLOCK: What was the thinking, that because it was glowing that it would be some sort of life force?
REDNISS: Yeah, It was a sort of panacea. It was promised to impart longevity, it was promised to impart virility, general all-over health.
BLOCK: And the idea, there was one other idea, which is fascinating, too, that you could paint your walls with radium paint, and the whole room would be sort of lighted from within. You imagine what that would look like with one of your illustrations, which is sort of - has this greenish-turquoise glow. The whole room is glowing with this paint.
REDNISS: Yes, there was a chemist who formulated radium paint that he called undark paint, and he said if you were to paint your house with this paint it would be as if there was moonlight.
BLOCK: Do you ever think about what that would be like to have a room that looked like that?
REDNISS: Oh, I think it would be heavenly.
BLOCK: You do?
REDNISS: I think that that is part of the quality that I try to capture in that image that you describe and in the cyanotypes, this kind of twilight softness.
BLOCK: If it weren't for the radium, it would all be great, right?
REDNISS: Right, exactly. If it wasn't toxic, you can't beat it.
BLOCK: Well, Lauren Redniss, thank you so much.
REDNISS: Thank you.
BLOCK: Lauren Redniss is the author and artist behind the visual biography "Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a Tale of Love and Fallout.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is All Things Considered from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY: President Obama was able to celebrate some positive news on the economic front today, as the unemployment rate dropped from 9.8 to 9.4 percent. But Mr. Obama says, even though the economy's recovering, there's a lot of work left to do.
P: Our mission has to be to accelerate hiring and to accelerate growth. And that depends on making our economy more competitive so that we're fostering new jobs and new industries and training workers to fill them.
HORSLEY: To help in that effort, the president appointed Gene Sperling director of the National Economic Council. He'll replace Larry Summers, who returned to his teaching post at Harvard last month. Mr. Obama notes Sperling has held the director's job before during the Clinton administration. Sperling joked in a 2006 speech that assignment began awkwardly when his 5'5" frame was dwarfed behind a lectern set up for the 6'2" President Clinton.
BLOCK: I just got up on my tiptoes as high as I could.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: And so on live TV, the leader of the free world tapped me on the shoulder and then he kicks a little button and a step would come out.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: And so that was my first 10 seconds of being the national economic adviser.
HORSLEY: There was no repeat of that today. Sperling didn't even approach the lectern. But Mr. Obama praised his new adviser's intelligence and his work ethic. So did Berkeley economist Laura Tyson, who was Sperling's boss at the council in the early 1990s.
P: Gene is a workaholic. He works morning, noon and night and he is a great asset in terms of getting the job done.
HORSLEY: Sperling's biggest job in the Clinton years was helping to turn budget deficits into surpluses, often through negotiation with Republicans on Capitol Hill.
P: He has a history of working with a Republican Congress, so that experience should serve him well in this round.
HORSLEY: For the last two years, Sperling's been an adviser to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. He helped broker the tax cut compromise with Republicans during the lame-duck session of Congress. Some liberals don't like that compromise or the big paycheck Sperling received from Goldman Sachs in 2008. Dean Baker, of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, also believes Sperling's commitment to deficit reduction is misplaced, when the real problem now is unemployment.
BLOCK: You've had this focus on the deficit that just is completely out of line with the reality, and I worry that, you know, Gene is one of the people that I won't say ascribes to that 100 percent, but I think ascribes to that maybe 70 percent.
HORSLEY: In that 2006 speech, Sperling described himself as a pro-growth progressive, which means he's concerned with both the size of the economic pie and the way it's divided up.
BLOCK: The notion that a rising tide should lift all boats is the core aspiration for what economic policy should be in our country.
HORSLEY: Sperling's Clinton-era colleague Laura Tyson calls him a progressive centrist. That label might also be applied to President Obama in this second half of his term. Tyson says the goals are still progressive, but the means to get there have a pro-business tilt.
P: You have to bring along the business community. You have to bring along the private sector because the private sector is the generator of jobs.
HORSLEY: Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And for more on this week in politics, we're joined now by our regular Friday political contributors David Brooks, the columnist for The New York Times and E.J. Dionne, a columnist with The Washington Post. Welcome back to both of you.
DIONNE: Good to be here.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to see you.
BLOCK: And liberal groups, E.J. Dionne, you're hearing from them, everybody seems to be. They are rankled. They do not like this one bit.
DIONNE: And in the White House, having somebody who hears you is really important. And even when somebody is disagreed with, if they know they have a hearing, that matters. And I think Daley in that sense could be a very sort of helpful force to a White House that's a little bit closed in.
BLOCK: Well, David Brooks, what do you think? Does this indicate for you a more pro-business centrist tilt to the Obama administration?
BROOKS: And as far as Sperling goes, it's overstated to say he is a moderate Democrat anymore. I think he was maybe when he wrote that book, "The Pro-Growth Progressive." I think he shifted a little left as economic conditions have changed. And he's incredibly valuable because you wake him up at four in the morning and read him part of your speech you want to give on economic policy, he'll spew out nine policy programs that you can then put into practice. I mean he's incredibly prolific in coming up with 90 million different policy programs.
BLOCK: You're waking him up at four in the morning on a regular basis?
BROOKS: And if you wake him up, believe me, he's at the office.
DIONNE: You won't wake him up because he's already there. I mean, the one law he regularly violates is the Fair Wages and Hours Act because he works all the time.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DIONNE: One other thing that hasn't been noticed, Ron Bloom, who was involved in the auto rescue, has been given a new job to help rescue American manufacturing jobs in the White House. I think it's going to be very important, A, because a lot of progressives and labor people are going to like that, and, B, when you look at the whole swath of Democratic losses from upstate New York all the way to Wisconsin, blue collar manufacturing employment is really important to Obama's re-election.
BLOCK: It was of course a big week on Capitol Hill with the swearing in of the new Congress and, of course, the Republicans taking the majority in the House. Let's listen to the new speaker of the House, John Boehner, in his address on Wednesday.
JOHN BOEHNER: But above all else, we will welcome the battle of ideas, encourage it, engage it openly, honestly and respectfully.
BLOCK: And, also, we heard this week from the new House majority leader, Eric Cantor. Let's take a listen to him.
ERIC CANTOR: We're going to be about cutting spending and cutting the job- killing regulations that this administration has been about over the last two years.
BLOCK: E.J. Dionne, talk a bit about the new tone for Republicans in Congress.
DIONNE: It's ironic because Cantor, among others, criticized President Obama for saying after the last election, elections have consequences. Yet Cantor himself is saying exactly the same thing on health care. He said it has been litigated according to the American people. So there is humility but not really in this new leadership.
BLOCK: David Brooks, what do you see happening with the Congress here? The divided Congress now, Democrats still control the Senate, but with a narrower majority and Republicans taking charge in the House.
BROOKS: And so the senior Republicans are trying to throttle them back and say, we're with you ideologically, but you just can't cut $100 billion in the middle of a fiscal year because a lot of things have already been committed to. There are all these restraints on how we can act and they're trying to ease them into that and the psychological sort of tension between those two mentalities is really, to me, fascinating.
BLOCK: And which mentality do you see sort of taking supremacy there?
BROOKS: Well, I think at the end of the day what's going to happen is they're going to say, if you don't raise the debt ceiling, we go into chaos. And what's going to happen then is that Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and a lot of the talk radio guys are - they're going to go into chaos and you're going to have a - quite a dramatic moment in the conservative ranks.
BLOCK: E.J., briefly, last word.
DIONNE: John Kennedy, whose inaugural we're celebrating this month, said he who rides the back of the tiger usually ends up inside. And I think the danger for the Republicans is they're going to push this debt limit thing and then may lose control of it at the end. That's a big danger for the country.
BLOCK: Thanks to you both. Have a good weekend.
DIONNE: Thank you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
BLOCK: E.J. Dionne, columnist for The Washington Post and David Brooks for The New York Times.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
As Steve Newborn of member station WUSF reports, the move has actually shut down a runway far to the south in Tampa.
STEVE NEWBORN: The magnetic North Pole is not a fixed object. It's continually moving. It's actually racing from Canada to Siberia and that has officials at Tampa International Airport a little busy today.
SCOTT LOPER: Over 100 sign panels need to be changed, 40 signs, surface-painted signs, a lot of work going on.
NEWBORN: Pilots have traditionally flown with the help of a magnetic compass, and runways are designated along the points of the compass. The runway known as 1-8 Right - for its place at 180 degrees on the compass - is now found at 190 degrees. So up went the barricades, and the airport's jets will have to use another runway for a week while its approach numbers and signs are repainted. Loper says it's not just Tampa International feeling the sting of the shifting North Magnetic Pole.
LOPER: Atlanta, I believe, is going to have to close some of their runways to start their process. Last year, we had West Palm Beach that had some runways they had to do.
NEWBORN: The idea of using magnetic compasses in this age of satellites and instantaneous communications may seem quaint. But Loper says it will still be a while before aviation officials can steer away from the designation.
LOPER: You have your GPS's - that's more based on true north and longitude/latitude because it's satellite and better fixes and stuff like that. So it's getting more precise, but they haven't made the change yet.
NEWBORN: For NPR News, I'm Steve Newborn in Tampa.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
As NPR's Andrea Seabrook reports, today's move was Republicans' opening salvo in the next political battle over health care.
ANDREA SEABROOK: What happened today was kind of a test vote on repealing health care. It was just a procedural measure: the rules that will govern the debate over the real repeal bill next week. But as a test, Republicans passed with flying colors: 236 to 181, 2 members voted present. What made today's floor debate interesting was hearing from a few of the feisty, confident Republican freshmen like Vicky Hartzler.
VICKY HARTZLER: This is a freedom bill.
SEABROOK: Hartzler represents the people in Missouri's 4th District who, she says, are especially angry that the government will force them to buy health insurance.
HARTZLER: By passing this last year, you have taken away my freedom, the freedom of the people of the 4th District and the freedom of this country.
SEABROOK: Another newly-elected Republican, Nan Hayworth of New York, is a physician.
NAN HAYWORTH: The House's vote to repeal is the first step towards assuring that all Americans will have the quality, choice and innovation in health care that they expect and deserve.
SEABROOK: That's why Congress watchers keep calling this repeal bill symbolic, which Hayworth, the New York freshman, totally rejects.
HAYWORTH: The bill we will be considering is in no way merely symbolic. It represents the true will of the American people, the majority of whom have stated time after time that they reject this law.
PETER DEFAZIO: Previous speaker's right, this is not symbolic, it's real.
SEABROOK: Oregon Democrat Peter DeFazio matched the new Republicans' zeal.
DEFAZIO: The Republicans are going to allow the return of the worst abuses of the health insurance industry: pre-existing condition exclusions, taking away your policy when you get sick, lifetime and annual caps, throwing your kids off your policies.
SEABROOK: Vermont Democrat Peter Welch simultaneously congratulated and chided House Republicans.
PETER WELCH: You campaigned effectively. You beat us good. You ran on the agenda of defeating health care and repealing it. Now you're doing it. Own it. Admit what it is you are doing.
SEABROOK: Andrea Seabrook, NPR News, the Capitol.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Ina Jaffe reports.
INA JAFFE: Twenty-five-year-old Richard Ruiz works in the movie business. He's an assistant to a film director, but going to the movies, there probably won't be much money left for that after March 1st. Ruiz is a Blue Shield of California customer.
RICHARD RUIZ: I came back from the holidays and had an envelope from Blue Shield in my mailbox and opened it up and it was a nice New Year's surprise saying that my rate was going up 57 percent.
JAFFE: And so that brings it from what to what?
RUIZ: I was paying about $70 a month and it's going up to, like, $110.
JAFFE: Ruiz is young and healthy and has a barebones policy.
RUIZ: Basically if I get hit by a car or if, you know, something else catastrophic happens.
JAFFE: But his budget is barebones, too. So, an extra 40 bucks a month is a big deal.
RUIZ: Month to month, when you're basically breaking even and everyone is telling you the best thing you can do as a young person is save and not go into debt and be financially responsible, every little bit matters.
JAFFE: Regardless, California's newly-elected insurance commissioner would like Blue Shield to hold off. In a conference call, Democrat Dave Jones pointed out he was just sworn in this week. And so...
DAVE JONES: I have asked that the company postpone its rate increase 60 days in order to afford me the opportunity to fully review the proposed rate increase.
JAFFE: Though, Jones said that doesn't mean he can do anything about it.
JONES: Unfortunately, under California law, the insurance commissioner does not have the legal authority to reject excessive premium increases.
JAFFE: Now some California legislators and consumer advocates want the state to take more control over health insurance. Such legislation has failed in the past, but Jamie Court, the president of Consumer Watchdog, is feeling more hopeful now.
JAMIE COURT: We now have a new governor. We now have a new legislature and we are now working on legislation this year to do it again. And my consumer group is committed to going to the ballot box to get premium regulation. If the legislature won't give it to us, the voters are going to take matters into their own hands.
JAFFE: Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
The health care debate can be confusing. That much is clear. And as efforts to repeal the law intensify, it will likely get even more confusing. So, we'd like to help clarify things as best we can.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
All we need from you are your questions. Just go to npr.org and click on Contact Us. Put health care question in the subject line and we'll get you some answers next week.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Over the coming months, senators will wrestle with a number of contentious issues. Among them: Changes to the filibuster rules, a possible repeal of the health care law and efforts to slash the deficit.
NORRIS: Leader Reid, thank you so much for being with us.
HARRY REID: My pleasure.
NORRIS: Now, you still have the majority here in the Senate, although a slimmer one. How does this change things for you, the legislation going forward, your relationships with people in the minority, particularly Senator Mitch McConnell?
REID: So I think that's what we should focus on. And I feel comfortable with my relationship with McConnell and the Republican caucus, that we can get some good things done.
NORRIS: The lame-duck session was extraordinary. What lessons do you take from that? Is this a case where the planets just lined up, and there was this sort of unprecedented degree of cooperation? Or do you think that there are possibilities growing out of that?
REID: I also learned in that election that the American people - the people of Nevada, which is no different than people of this country - want us to work together. And I think we were able to get a lot of things done because of that. And I think - I don't want to be boastful here - but I think I know what the rules are around here, and I was able to do some things that got votes that normally we wouldn't have votes on.
NORRIS: I want to ask you about the changes to the filibuster rules - changes that your Democratic colleagues introduced this week. They would change when and how a senator could filibuster. Are these changes necessary? And help me understand, if you think they are necessary, why they're necessary.
REID: Everyone knows that the filibuster has been abused in recent years. And we have to either by an agreement or by changing the rules here, in a forceful way, make sure that this abuse doesn't continue. It's just wrong.
NORRIS: Abuse is a strong word.
REID: You even have Chief Justice Roberts, who everyone knows his partisan stripe, has said its wrong how judges are handled here - it's just wrong. We can't have scores of the president's nominations just, in effect, thrown away. We never get a chance to vote on them. And these deliberate delays that take place to prevent us from voting on things, doesn't help the American people.
NORRIS: Now, you know that the political waves in this city are much like a sine curve - you're up one era, you're down the next. So what happens if the Democrats should find themselves in the minority? Aren't you disadvantaging yourself going forward?
REID: Anything that I'm considering has nothing to do with changing the 60-vote filibuster. There are things we can do to streamline things around here that would be very significant - things we can do that would streamline the processes around here, and does not do anything to hurt the framework of the Senate, whether you're in the majority or minority.
NORRIS: Let's turn to health care, if we could. The House today took the first step toward repealing health care. An actual vote will come up next week. Would you allow a similar repeal to come up for a vote here on the Senate side?
REID: I mean we're talking about, over the next few years, well more than a trillion dollars.
NORRIS: Now, you know they quarrel with those numbers.
REID: This is nonsense. This repeal of this bill would put - let's see, I got to make sure I get the number right. Yeah, 32 million more people would be uninsured. Thirty-two million - what are they talking about?
NORRIS: I don't want to belabor this. But if you have the votes, why not let it come to a vote and then just move on?
REID: Because I think it's important that people understand that we do not think we got perfection with this legislation. We want to try to improve it. We don't want to try to destroy it.
NORRIS: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, thank you very much for your time.
REID: My pleasure.
: Senator McConnell, welcome to the program.
MITCH MCCONNELL: Glad to be with you.
: What to do you say to Senator Reid on that?
MCCONNELL: And so I'm pleased that the House is going to take it up. And we're going to make sure that the Senate has an opportunity to vote on it, as well.
: It's interesting when you look at the poll numbers on this, because there's reasonably even split on repealing it - more favor it than don't but it's not overwhelming. But individual components of the bill are very popular: guaranteeing coverage for pre-existing conditions, for example. So what about those provisions that Americans seem to like a whole lot?
MCCONNELL: Well, we need to not only repeal this bill, we need to replace it with something else. And some of the insurance reforms that you've mentioned are very likely to be in a replacement bill that would be much more simple, more easily understood, and crafted in such a way to drive down cost.
: Senator McConnell, when you look at the numbers coming out from the Congressional Budget Office estimating that repealing the health care bill would add $230 billion to the deficit, does that give you pause?
MCCONNELL: I don't think anybody seriously thinks that this is going to drive down costs. In fact, health insurance costs are going up all over the country right now in the wake of this.
: You don't buy the argument that those health care costs would be going up regardless, that they're not affected by health care because so many provisions haven't gone into effect yet?
MCCONNELL: Yeah. No, I don't buy that. I've been in conversation with too many companies who are looking at the impact of this and responding to it. I think everybody is trying to adjust to this massive change in American health care. And it's doing exactly what Senate Republicans predicted during the debate: driving up cost.
: And I'm wondering if you stand by that wording that the...
MCCONNELL: Oh, yeah. I do stand by it.
: ...single-most important for Republicans...
MCCONNELL: We've had an election every two years since 1788. It doesn't mean you don't do anything, but it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that Republicans would like to see a Republican president in a couple years.
: But to call it the single most important Republican goal?
MCCONNELL: But yes, when the next election rolls around, I'm certainly going to do everything I can to help elect a Republican president of the United States.
: So even if those things that you're talking about that might be room for compromise with the Democrats would help the re-electability of President Obama, you think that's okay?
MCCONNELL: Well, look. I mean, you know, we weren't sent here to do nothing, and he's in the White House. The Democrats control the Senate, and Republicans control the House. Neither party has total control. The question is: Will we sit here and spin our wheels, or will we try to do some things together for the American people? I prefer the latter.
: You have said that you see this as an opportunity to get the fiscal house in order. I wonder how you would do that and what it would take for you to be a yes vote on raising the debt limit.
MCCONNELL: Well, it is an opportunity. I mean, we all know that the country is drowning in a sea of debt, and nothing underscores that like the decision to raise the debt limit. So it's an opportunity for us to work together and see if we can make some significant progress on spending and debt. So I think both parties ought to welcome that opportunity.
: Would you be willing to risk, say, a government shutdown if there is no consensus?
MCCONNELL: Well, we're not talking about that. What we're talking about is taking advantage of this opportunity to do something important to reduce spending and debt, and what better time to do it than when you're voting on raising the debt ceiling?
: And what would your ideas be on ways to get there?
MCCONNELL: Well, we'll be happy to discuss that with you at the appropriate time. But what is a better time to talk about addressing spending and debt when you're called upon to vote to raise the nation's debt ceiling? I think it's the perfect opportunity for both sides to come together and do something significant.
: Okay, Senator McConnell, thank you very much.
MCCONNELL: Thank you.
: That's the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
What they publish winds up on those chemistry wall charts you may remember from high school, called the Periodic Table of Elements, and includes those atomic weights. The commission is changing the value for those atomic weights. Instead of just one number, from now on they will show a range of values. Research chemist Tyler Coplen.
D: The concept that we're trying to get across to students by doing this is to indicate to them that these atomic weights are not constants of nature, but they vary, and they vary because there are different portions, different fractions of stable isotopes in materials.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Now, there are some elements, such as gold and aluminum, that do have stable weights. Others are radioactive and have no standard atomic weight, such as radium. Coplen says in the future, more elements may get an atomic weight makeover.
D: My daughter Wendy says to me: Dad, you've just made chemistry harder for everybody.
NORRIS: So all those pull-down charts and textbooks that carry the Periodic Table of the Elements will now have to be updated. Will Coplen get any kind of kickback from those manufacturers?
D: I missed that. I should have thought ahead. But no, I'm not.
BLOCK: That's research chemist Tyler Coplen, explaining the changes to how the atomic weights of 10 elements will be shown on the periodic table.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
At first glance, the latest jobs report released this morning seems encouraging. The unemployment rate fell from 9.8 to 9.4 percent. That's the biggest month-to-month decline in a decade. But a closer look reveals that drop was due mostly to people leaving the workforce, and that's not a good sign.
NORRIS: But first, we have more on the jobs numbers from NPR's Jim Zarroli.
JIM ZARROLI: The Labor Department said 103,000 jobs were added to U.S. payrolls in December, and there were nearly 70,000 more jobs than first thought during the preceding two months. The numbers fell short of the kind of blowout that some economists had predicted. Diane Swonk is chief economist at Mesirow Financial.
DIANE SWONK: We did generate more jobs. The trend is in the right direction. But, you know, let's face it, even 170,000 net would be considered anemic for any other recovery, except this one.
ZARROLI: The report did show a big and somewhat perplexing decline in the unemployment rate. Swonk says the drop is due at least in part to the number of discouraged workers who stopped looking for jobs and are no longer counted as unemployed by the government.
SWONK: Somehow, almost half a million men in particular disappeared off the planet apparently in the month of December because they're no longer in the labor force.
ZARROLI: Despite that, today's report depicts a job market that is slowly showing improvement, and a lot of people who'll get laid off this year will have an easier time finding work than they would have last year.
JULIA FLORENCEKEYA: Unidentified Woman: Transferable.
FLORENCEKENYA: Exactly.
ZARROLI: At a jobs center run by the New York Labor Department this morning, Julia Florencekeya was talking to a jobs counselor. She lost her job as an events planner for a public relations firm three weeks ago, but she doesn't expect to be out of work very long.
FLORENCEKEYA: I'm very optimistic. I think it's going to take time, but I don't think it's going to be a year. I hear everywhere that it's picking up, so hopefully that's the case.
ZARROLI: Across the room sat Victor Gonzalez, who was laid off from his technician's job at IBM two years ago. I told Gonzalez the unemployment rate had fallen sharply last month, and he gave me a look that can best be described as deeply skeptical.
VICTOR GONZALEZ: All I see is they're cutting back and cutting back more, and that's the problem. You've got a lot of guys want to work and nobody wants to give the opportunity.
ZARROLI: Austan Goolsbee chairs the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
AUSTAN GOOLSBEE: We started from a very deep hole, worse than most any of our lifetimes, so we got a long way to go. The president is the first to say that, but I think we've clearly made steady progress. We're headed in the right direction.
ZARROLI: Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Veteran sports reporter Andrea Kremer joins me to talk about the climate for women journalists in sports. She's a sideline reporter with NBC's "Sunday Night Football," and she started her TV career at ESPN back in 1989 as the network's first female correspondent. Andrea, welcome to the program.
ANDREA KREMER: Thanks, Melissa, great to chat with you.
BLOCK: Does this incident to you seem to be a reflection on a bigger issue of how women sports reporters are treated?
KREMER: You know, women have earned their positions. I've always maintained there's not a sports gene that only men possess, and it doesn't always have to be about why they are there. It should be, in my opinion, about what do they contribute to a telecast or to a broadcast.
BLOCK: Have you heard this over the years, Andrea, that you can't possibly know the game as a woman if you haven't played it?
KREMER: They were buying me books. They were supporting my interest. And believe me, Melissa, I hear this all the time. Oh, did you have brothers? Is that why you like sports? No, I like sports because I just have loved it my whole life. But no, it's not something that's just endemic to men. Women can love it and be knowledgeable about it, just as men can.
BLOCK: Do you think there's a particular hurdle for women who are sideline reporters, that they have to justify their presence in a way that male sideline reporters would not be questioned?
KREMER: But you're there to - for your observational skills and to report, and there is reporting that can be done. See, I think that's the key, Melissa, is I think with the role of sideline reporter, the word reporter gets lost.
BLOCK: I think we've all heard, though, inane questions from sideline reporters, both men and women. And I wonder, when you hear those questions coming specifically from a woman reporter, do you kind of wince and say, boy, that's just going to reflect badly on all of us, make my job even harder?
KREMER: And look, your 10th-degree fallback should always be: What adjustments do you need to make, coach? It's not a compelling question, but if you give something specific, you know, for the most part you're going to get something usable that you want to say on air.
BLOCK: What do you think it would take to have more women in the booth or in the studio? There are some now, but mostly women are on the sidelines.
KREMER: You need to work from the ground up. You need to pay your dues, and you need to earn those stripes. I mean, I would not be in favor of just throwing a woman in the booth if she had never done it before. And I think that that's something that's really important to keep in mind.
BLOCK: Andrea Kremer is sideline reporter with NBC's "Sunday Night Football." Andrea, thanks very much.
KREMER: It's a pleasure, Melissa. Thank you so much.
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MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
But first, NPR's Richard Harris tells us about new government proposals to change the standard for fluoride.
RICHARD HARRIS: Fluoride helps prevent cavities throughout a person's lifetime. But you can have too much of a good thing. In children, too much fluoride can create a condition called fluorosis. Dental professor Howard Pollick at U.C. San Francisco says it's usually very subtle.
HOWARD POLLICK: We see a little white streaking, perhaps, when we dry the teeth and look closely with a good light.
HARRIS: And fluorosis is on the rise. A recent federal study found that 40 percent of adolescents have subtle signs of it. Occasionally, it's worse. But Pollick says those serious cases are not on account of fluoride deliberately added to the water to make teeth stronger.
POLLICK: We only see those where there is a natural level of fluoride that's very high in the water. This is well beyond the areas of water fluoridation.
HARRIS: But another part of the federal bureaucracy is planning to move faster. Today, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it's proposing to lower its recommendation for how much fluoride utilities should deliberately add to the water to prevent cavities. Dr. Howard Koh is the Assistant Secretary for Health.
HOWARD KOH: In the past, people received almost all their fluoride from drinking water only, but currently it's now been recognized that people receive fluoride from at least several other sources, from toothpaste and mouth rinses, for example.
HARRIS: The old standard was also a sliding scale. It recommended less fluoride in hot climates, figuring that kids from the South who were playing outside would drink a lot more water than kids in cool climates, so they would need less in any given gulp to protect against cavities.
KOH: But with the advent of air-conditioning and other advances, it was found in a study published only a year ago, actually, that people drink about the same amount of water regardless of where they live around the country. So that's where the science showed us that a range is no longer needed. And instead, a single target was a better public health recommendation.
HARRIS: And after all, the federal government doesn't require that fluoride be added to drinking water.
KOH: We are putting up these proposed recommendations on the federal register for public notice over the next 30 days. And then, ultimately, these are decisions that are made at the local level.
HARRIS: And at home, parents can make sure their kids swallow less fluoridated toothpaste. Richard Harris, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
But as NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, newer disinfection techniques are turning out to have problems of their own.
JON HAMILTON: It's been a century since water systems in the U.S. began using chlorine to prevent the spread of diseases like cholera and typhoid. David Sedlak of U.C. Berkeley says for much of that time, people thought chlorination was completely safe.
DAVID SEDLAK: It wasn't until about the 1970s that we started to realize that chlorine had some unintended consequences. And one of the biggest unintended consequences of adding chlorine to water was that it reacts with some of the organic matter in the water to produce carcinogenic byproducts.
HAMILTON: They didn't pose a big risk. Still, the Environmental Protection Agency decided water systems could do better. So the EPA came up with new rules that prompted many water systems to start using a related disinfectant called chloramine. Sedlak says it didn't produce the same byproducts chlorine did.
SEDLAK: But then research that came out after utilities had switched to chloramine started to show that there were a variety of different problems that no one had anticipated.
HAMILTON: For one thing, Sedlak says, chloramine could produce byproducts of its own, called nitrosamines.
SEDLAK: Nitrosamines are the compounds that people warned you about when they told you you shouldn't be eating those nitrite-cured hot dogs. They're about a thousand times more carcinogenic than the disinfection byproducts that we'd been worried about with regular old chlorine.
HAMILTON: And about 20 percent of people in the U.S. now drink water treated with chloramine. Utilities can take steps to prevent nitrosamines from forming in this water, and many do. But chloramine turns out to have other risks, something people in the District of Columbia learned the hard way.
MARC EDWARDS: Washington, D.C., is a good case study in unintended consequences.
HAMILTON: Marc Edwards is a civil engineer at Virginia Tech. In 2004, he began testing water samples he'd from D.C. households for lead.
EDWARDS: I saw these results that were very perplexing, and they didn't really jive with the other data that the water company and the EPA had given me.
HAMILTON: Over time, it became clear what had happened and why. Washington, D.C., had a lot of lead pipes in its system then. But chlorine had helped keep the lead in those pipes from leaching out. Edwards says Chloramine didn't offer the same protection.
EDWARDS: So when this well-intentioned switch occurred, suddenly we had just unheard-of levels of lead in the drinking water.
HAMILTON: On the other hand, places like San Francisco have switched to chloramine without apparent problems. Edwards says that's a reminder that every water system reacts differently to a change in disinfectants.
EDWARDS: Our water systems have been assembled over a period of hundreds of years, and we've got all kinds of materials out there. We've got cement, you've got iron. You've got three different types of lead-bearing plumbing. You've got copper. You've got plastic.
HAMILTON: Chloramine isn't the only chlorine alternative to run into trouble. Some systems have tried ozone only to find out that it too can create carcinogenic byproducts. And other systems have tried to purify water without chemicals, using ultraviolet light. David Sedlak says that works fine, but there's a caveat.
SEDLAK: Once you turn off the light, the disinfection power isn't there anymore. And one of the places where we need disinfecting power is in the pipes that take water from the drinking water treatment plant to our homes. And that's because our pipe systems are leaky.
HAMILTON: Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
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MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is NPR.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Welcome to the program.
MARTIN DALY: Thank you very much.
NORRIS: Help us understand the differences between the people of the north and the people of the south, and has there always been this cultural and political and economic divide between them?
DALY: Yes, it's age-old. The north is almost entirely Muslim, almost entirely Arabic-speaking. The south is almost entirely non-Arabic-speaking and almost entirely non-Muslim. So there is a general divide between north and south, which was exacerbated during the colonial period when the British tried to impose differences between the regions.
NORRIS: For what purpose?
DALY: Whatever the motives were for that policy, the result was an even greater divide between the two regions, so that at independence, the south was even more backward in comparison to the north than perhaps it had been when the colonial period began.
NORRIS: And what about the border that now divides the two regions? Is that a natural border? How was this line, this demarcation drawn?
DALY: So the border is arbitrary and has yet to be delimited, and that's one of the things that would have to be worked out if the vote takes place for secession, which is everyone expects.
NORRIS: What would it take for it to really stand up and grow and prosper as a freestanding nation?
DALY: There's been a great deal of corruption. There's been a great deal of nepotism in the transitional regime there now. And the fear is that even with a great deal of oil wealth, the country will need a lot of foreign assistance, not only financially but in terms of practical advice and help.
NORRIS: Martin Daly, it's been good to talk to you. Thank you very much.
DALY: You're very welcome.
NORRIS: Martin Daly is the author of "The History of the Sudan."
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MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
NPR: Pediatricians often recommend using a humidifier to treat coughs and colds. But as NPR's Nancy Shute reports, it might not be doing as much good as you think.
NANCY SHUTE: Kids get a lot of colds in the winter, and mine is no exception. When my child is sick, getting out the humidifier is the least I can do.
(SOUNDBITE OF HUMIDIFIER)
SHUTE: And I'm not the only one. Some doctors run the humidifier when their kids are sick. And Stephen Teach is one of them. He's an asthma expert at Children's National Medical Center.
STEPHEN TEACH: Colds are incredibly common. We can expect the average child to get between six and eight colds from September through the spring, and the options that moms and dads and pediatricians have to treat these colds are relatively few. And as a parent myself, I can tell you that we did these all the time when our children were young.
SHUTE: But an article in this week's Pediatrics says humidifiers don't do kids a lick of good. Teach, actually, agrees.
TEACH: There's no evidence that use of a humidifier decreases a child's symptoms when they have a cold.
SHUTE: Erwin Gelfand is head of pediatrics at National Jewish Health in Denver.
ERWIN GELFAND: There's a lot of old wives' tales about humidified air and how beneficial it is, because I think everybody thinks that if you have humidified air, it's easier to breathe.
SHUTE: Instead, Gelfand says there are lots of reasons to not use a humidifier. Those old-fashioned steam vaporizers can be dangerous.
GELFAND: A big risk, but the hot ones are burns. And, you know, for kids, many kids got burned with the old hot steam humidifiers.
SHUTE: The newer ultrasonic humidifiers can spread germs, mold and toxic metals.
GELFAND: So you can imagine in a humidifier that those bacteria, those molds may be growing as well, and what you're doing is you're dispersing them into the air.
SHUTE: Humidifiers come with lots of instructions for cleaning them with bleach and vinegar and using distilled water. That's supposed to make them safer, but we probably aren't doing a very good job.
GELFAND: Most people don't get at where the water is dispersed. So even though you think you're cleaning it, you're probably not eliminating a lot of the stuff that's growing there.
SHUTE: Stephen Teach says that's especially true for the millions of kids with allergies and asthma.
TEACH: What we do know is that humidification of the home environment will encourage mold growth. And, of course, mold is a very common trigger for children with asthma.
SHUTE: Despite all that bad news, doctors know that when the kids get sick, we parents are still going to turn on the humidifier. But they like us to know that everybody in the family already has a great humidifier, and it's as close as the nose on your face.
GELFAND: We humidify the air we breathe, right? That's why we go through the nose. We have the hairs in the nose filter out, you know, large particles, and we do humidify the air before it goes down into the lung.
SHUTE: Hmm. I'm glad to know that my nose is up to the job.
(SOUNDBITE OF HUMIDIFIER)
SHUTE: Nancy Shute, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPOKEN
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: Reporter Bill Diem covers the car industry in France. He says Renault and its partner Nissan are investing billions of dollars in electric car technology.
BILL DIEM: Between Renault and Nissan, they're investing 4 billion euros over the next three or four years to put out a total of eight electric vehicles. Nobody else is doing anything like that much.
BEARDSLEY: The French government, which owns a 15 percent stake in Renault, is taking the accusations very seriously. The auto sector is a major employer in France. President Nicolas Sarkozy is reported to have asked French intelligence services to investigate the role China might have played in the affair. French industry minister Eric Besson warned of an overall risk to French industry.
ERIC BESSON: (Through translator) This is a huge danger for French industry, and what happened at Renault is nothing less than economic warfare. We have to be on our guard for the future.
BEARDSLEY: Journalist Bill Diem says he wonders if Renault isn't overreacting. He remembers how the company responded when a magazine published a photo of one of its prototypes, a common occurrence in the automobile press.
DIEM: Renault went ballistic and they made a complaint to the police, and the police arrested the journalist who had printed it in his magazine. And that's crazy. Well, it just makes me think that Renault is paranoid.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DIEM: I will use the word.
BEARDSLEY: For NPR news, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Paris.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Sportswriter Stefan Fatsis joins us now, as he does most Fridays. Hey, Stefan.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Michele.
NORRIS: Now, before we get down to this weekend's big games, we've got some football business news to take care of. Let's handle that first. There were reports this week that the NFL was close to extending its television contract with ESPN. Please tell us more.
FATSIS: That's going to put the NFL in an awkward position. The league is negotiating with its players' union over a new labor contract. It is arguing that its economics are in turmoil, and it's kind of hard to make that argument if you're getting paid $2 billion a year for the rights to one game a week.
NORRIS: Yeah, it seems like you could just say thank you.
FATSIS: You've got to read between Goodell's platitudes about protecting player safety while simultaneously giving fans more regular season games, which the league wants to do. This letter is simply part of a public relations strategy that the league is going to need if, as many people fear, a deal stalls, the NFL locks out the players and, worst-case scenario, some or all of 2011, the season gets cancelled.
NORRIS: Oh, horror. Let's not think of that. But we...
FATSIS: And after that...
NORRIS: Now, can you give us a quick breakdown, and I just got to say, the Seahawks?
FATSIS: They made it because they won a very weak National Football Conference West Division. Their opponents, the Saints, won 11 games, but they're the ones that have to get on a plane and travel six hours and play a road game in a very noisy stadium.
NORRIS: How does that happen?
FATSIS: I think you could go further and get rid of divisions entirely, but I wouldn't hold my breath on that.
NORRIS: Stefan, we need you to help us out with something. There's one longstanding practice in the NFL that's changed for the playoff season, and that's the way a tied game is settled in overtime. It's always been sudden death. First team to score wins. Not anymore. Tell us about this new procedure.
FATSIS: I think that both teams should have a crack at the ball in an overtime because there's more equity in that, but I think it should happen regardless of the method of scoring.
NORRIS: Thank you, Stefan. Happy viewing this weekend.
FATSIS: Thanks, Michele.
NORRIS: That's Stefan Fatsis. He's the author of "A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL," and he joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and the business of sports.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
We just heard about new rule changes in the NFL. But we're thinking, why stop there?
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Sports fans complain all the time about rules. Here's your chance to complain to us. What rule changes do you want to see in your favorite sports?
BLOCK: Fewer timeouts at the end of a basketball game, or maybe required fighting in hockey.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NORRIS: That'd be fun. Well, you can reach us on Twitter. Our handle is npratc, that's all one word. So please tweet those rule changes to @npratc.
BLOCK: Or you can also write to us at npr.org. Just click on Contact Us, and please put rules in the subject line.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Chris Arnold visited a midsized manufacturing company in outside Boston that's been hiring back its laid-off workers.
CHRIS ARNOLD: M&H Engineering is housed inside of a completely boring, ordinary warehouse-type building by the side of the highway. Driving by, you'd never give it a thought. But inside, the factory floor is like something out of a science-fiction movie. Workers are running big computer-controlled machines and making implantable body parts.
TIMOTHY MARTENS: We have worked on artificial hearts, replacement hips, bone screws, knees.
ARNOLD: Timothy Martens helps run this family manufacturing business. It also makes other medical equipment and gear for the aerospace and computer industries. And he says that business has finally been picking up again.
MARTENS: Right now, we're at about 50 employees, running two shifts day and night. During the recession, we were down to about 25 or 27 employees, so.
ARNOLD: Really? So you really laid off half your workforce?
MARTENS: Yeah. We laid off half the workforce.
ARNOLD: Now, you might think something like bone screws or replacement hips. Those aren't things that would be too affected by a recession. But it turns out that in this recession, those orders had slowed way down, too.
MARTENS: It's amazing how you wouldn't think of it like you said, like, why would bone screws and hips slow down. People need them. But people are afraid to lose their jobs, so they're not going to leave work for three months while they rehab and do that.
ARNOLD: (Unintelligible) get the replacement hip surgery.
MARTENS: Get a replacement hip.
ARNOLD: Tim Martens' brother Michael is also a partner in the business.
MICHAEL MARTENS: We had employees that should have gone for an operation but were actually afraid of losing their job. And we told them, no, you're not going to lose your job. You know, get the hernia operation, get better.
(SOUNDBITE OF MACHINERY)
ARNOLD: Across the factory floor, Mike Warren works in the shipping and receiving department. He's recently been hired back on. After working for the company for almost 20 years, he was laid off for a year and a half.
MIKE WARREN: I've got two kids at home and a wife, so it's great to be back at work. It just feels great to be able to earn my own money and feel like I'm actually a part of society and should really feel - you're kind of left out when you're out of work, so it was tough.
ARNOLD: Warren has known the business owners here since kindergarten. And the factory production manager, Mark Callahan, says like many smaller companies, just about everybody here knows each other pretty well.
MARK CALLAHAN: I know all their wives, all their children. And so when you let the guy go, see, you're thinking of his whole family. It tears your heart out, but sometimes it's what you need to do as a business, so you do it. It's great to bring them back.
ARNOLD: Callahan says, though, there's still a feeling in the air here with all these guys coming back to work that it might not last.
CALLAHAN: Believe me, these people are still nervous.
ARNOLD: Callahan says back before the holidays, he shut down a couple of the big machines here for a few weeks just for logistical reasons.
CALLAHAN: I don't know how many of them came up to me and said, jeez, Mark, you know, what's the story? You know, are we going to have Christmas, or what's the first of the year look like? They were really nervous. I'm like guys, no, no, no, don't worry. You're fine. We're not slowing down.
ARNOLD: Tim Martens.
MARTENS: They used to have a blanket order for 10,000 widgets over a year. And now, what they're going to do is they're going to do 2,000 over six months. And then all of a sudden, they'll be like, okay, we actually used those and now really they'll want another 3,000 real quickly.
ARNOLD: Michael Martens says all that uncertainty is still stifling job growth.
MARTENS: As soon as we get a little more of a comfort zone with our customers on their commitments on what they will be projecting and what they're be going to be needing from us, it will allow us to hire a bunch more people. We are waiting to be able to hire more people. We just can't have it that we have excess capacity.
ARNOLD: Chris Arnold, NPR News, Boston.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And, Ari, tell us first more about the bill itself.
ARI SHAPIRO: I mean, this part had bipartisan support. And if you think of Congress as holding the purse strings on the government, they basically snapped the purse shut for any money to transfer detainees into the U.S. or to foreign countries. The effect would, basically, be to give the White House no choice but to keep the men at the prison and try them there - if they get trials at all.
BLOCK: And so the response from President Obama was what exactly?
SHAPIRO: Well, he could have vetoed the law, but he didn't. And he says he signed it because of the importance of authorizing spending for the military.
NORRIS: Instead, President Obama held his nose, and he signed the bill. He said it undermines the country's counterterrorism efforts and has the potential to harm our national security, but he would swallow it anyway. And he added, quote, "My administration will work with the Congress to seek repeal of these restrictions, will seek to mitigate their effects and will oppose any attempt to extend or expand them in the future."
BLOCK: And, Ari, why, if the president really does believe that this bill harms national security, why would he not do what President Bush had done and issue a signing statement that would say he ignores the provisions?
SHAPIRO: But, you know, those are the legal arguments. The political argument is President Obama railed against President Bush's use of signing statements in this way, both as a candidate and as a senator before that. It could have been politically nearly impossible for him to do that in this instance.
BLOCK: So in the end, Ari, what does this mean for the administration's efforts to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay?
SHAPIRO: So, entirely apart from the restrictions that Congress places on this, there is a whole range of challenges. And, in an ironic way, it might almost be better for the Obama White House that they can point to Congress and say it's your fault. You're responsible. You're the only reason we can't fulfill our campaign promise, rather than try to deal with all of these other challenges that are stacking up behind it.
BLOCK: Okay. NPR's Ari Shapiro, thanks so much.
SHAPIRO: You're welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Shayndi, what have you heard?
SHAYNDI RAICE: Since they got the iPhone, they've seen data traffic increase tremendously, and it's just really impact the service. And so there's been a lot of frustration from AT&T customers, but people have stuck with AT&T because they love their iPhone and they want the iPhone. And so now, it's going to be a game changer in the market. I mean, it's really going to just open up the whole market.
BLOCK: A game changer meaning good for Verizon could also be bad for AT&T, I would think?
RAICE: So we're not sure exactly, I think, how big of an impact it's going to have. You know, I would expect that it will have a very significant impact on AT&T, but, you know, there's some analysts who don't think it's really going to affect the stock too much.
BLOCK: And what about the impact for iPhone users?
RAICE: I think the other thing I should mention is that a couple weeks ago, AT&T was voted the worst network by Consumer Reports, and Verizon Wireless has the best. It's tied with Sprint. So, you know, for people who want to switch, they're going to get, you know, fewer dropped calls and better network quality.
BLOCK: How does this work, Shayndi, if AT&T had the exclusive deal with Apple up till now, what does that mean Apple had to do to get out from that exclusivity to open up a deal with Verizon?
RAICE: So it really makes sense for Verizon announcing it now. I mean, you know, this is, basically, a couple weeks, you know, after AT&T's exclusivity with the iPhone supposedly ended. So, this is it. This is the time.
BLOCK: Shayndi, thanks so much.
RAICE: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
In 1964, the British rock band The Animals made this song a classic.
(Soundbite of song, "House of the Rising Sun")
THE ANIMALS (Music Group): (Singing) There is a house in New Orleans they call the rising sun...
RAZ: But this song, "The House of the Rising Sun," is much, much older, and it was first recorded in 1937. It was sung by a 16-year-old girl named Georgia Turner, the daughter of a coal miner. And the person manning the recorder was Alan Lomax.
(Soundbite of song, "House of the Rising Sun")
Ms. GEORGIA TURNER: (Singing) They call the rising sun. And it's been the ruin of many a poor girl, and me, oh God, for one.
RAZ: Amazing to hear that, isn't it? Alan Lomax, who died in 2002, was quite possibly the greatest archivist of American folk music.
Mr. TODD HARVEY (Curator, Alan Lomax Collection, American Folklife Center): He wanted to create a real record of world sound.
RAZ: That's Todd Harvey. He's the curator of the Alan Lomax collection at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress here in Washington, D.C. The Folklife Center holds Alan Lomax's recorded work; work that dates from 1933 to 2000.
Mr. HARVEY: Alan's father ran this archive from 1932 to 1942. His father was the honorary curator and spent a great deal of his time on the road collecting materials for the Library of Congress, and Alan accompanied him sometimes. But they realized by the mid-1930s that it was becoming a substantial collection of material, and so they hired Alan as the assistant in charge in 1937.
RAZ: A few days ago, Todd Harvey took us on a tour of the archive.
(Soundbite of clicking)
Mr. HARVEY: Keys to the stairs, keys to the highway.
RAZ: Deep down in the basement of the Library of Congress is where the largest archive of recorded folk music in the world is located.
Mr. HARVEY: So this is Alan Lomax's tape collection.
RAZ: And what a collection.
Mr. HARVEY: Two hundred and fifty linear feet of manuscripts, 10,000 folders of paper, more than 15,000 sound recordings, 6,000 photographic images, 5,000 videos and films and several hundred artifacts.
RAZ: It is a breathtaking sight.
Mr. HARVEY: These are tapes mainly from Alan's field recordings. Here's Spain in the 1950s. Alan immigrated to Europe and did major field work in Spain and Italy and the British Isles, the U.S. - this is the famed "Southern Journey" trip of 1959.
RAZ: Todd Harvey pulls out a reel for us to hear.
Mr. HARVEY: This tape's about 40, 50 years old, but it still plays like the day it was made.
Unidentified Group: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
RAZ: John Szwed is a professor of music and jazz at Columbia University, and he's just released a new biography of Alan Lomax. It's called "The Man Who Recorded the World."
Unidentified Group: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
Professor JOHN SZWED (Music, Jazz Studies, Columbia University): This is something he recorded after he came out of the service and picked up a Guggenheim fellowship that allowed him to travel. And he went back South to parchment farms in Mississippi and he found this particular recording by a group of men cutting down a tree. Four men - two on one side, two on the other forming a square - and the two who were facing each other, or would be if they could see through the tree, were hitting at the same time and the others at the other time.
This was a work song. And it's quite an astonishing piece because it's got all the glorious features of African-American style, which is to say call and response with a leader who's passionate and breathless and huffing and puffing on the beat.
Unidentified Group: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
Mr. SZWED: Multiple melodies going - one melody behind the other - a backbeat, like a pre-rock and roll thing.
Unidentified Group: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
RAZ: One of the better-known musicians Alan Lomax and his father John are credited with discovering was somebody they found in a prison was Leadbelly. He eventually became very important in Lomax's life. Let's hear one of those recordings for a moment.
(Soundbite of song, "Midnight Special")
LEADBELLY (Singer): (Singing) Well, I'm calling that Captain. He turn a-loose my man. Let the midnight special shine her light on me.
RAZ: That's Leadbelly singing "Midnight Special." How did Alan and John Lomax come across him?
Mr. SZWED: They were in Angola Prison, which was not as full of singers as they thought they would find. And they ran into one guy who was singer par excellence. Everything about him radiated confidence, security in what he was doing.
(Soundbite of song, "Midnight Special")
LEADBELLY: (Singing) And if you say a thing about it, you have a trouble with the man. Let the midnight special...
Mr. SZWED: And...
RAZ: What was he in prison for?
Mr. SZWED: Murder and attempted murder. He had already gotten out of one prison by writing a song for the governor in Louisiana, and he thought this would work again and asked the Lomaxes to deliver one of his songs aimed to the governor to get him out. And he did get out, but it turns out not for that song but for good time. But it made a great story, and the press ate it up. Everywhere he went, there were stories about this. Some of them were brutal in their headlines, you know: Sings a Few Songs between Murders and that kind of thing.
(Soundbite of song, "Midnight Special")
LEADBELLY: (Singing) (Unintelligible) penitentiary bound. Let the midnight special shine her light on me.
RAZ: I think it was in the late 1930s when Alan Lomax ran into a man named Ferdinand Morton, better known as Jellyroll Morton, of course, who is today recognized as one of the originators of jazz. At that time, Jellyroll Morton was holding court at a place in Washington, D.C. called The Jungle Inn. He would serve champagne to people who would come in but was kind of forgotten. Did Alan Lomax kind of rediscover him?
Mr. SZWED: He was forgotten and was trying everything at the point that Alan found him.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. SZWED: And he was encouraged by local journalists and so forth to go to Lomax and ask him to record his story. And he had a not-too-deeply-concealed reason for this: his songs were being pirated by other people and big hits being made by Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway and other people, so he thought this would help. And Alan was suspicious of doing this and wound up recording him for a month and a half.
RAZ: And I want to play one of Jellyroll Morton's songs. This is called "Dr. Jazz."
(Soundbite of music, "Dr. Jazz")
RAZ: That's incredible music. John Szwed, what would you say Alan Lomax's legacy is? I mean, some people say he brought about a musical revolution. Is that going too far or is that true?
Mr. SZWED: Well, it's true. And it would take a time to make the case fully, but he was certainly the key figure in two folk revivals in the United States. But he was also basic to the British folk revival, which produced the music called skiffle.
(Soundbite of song, "Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor")
Mr. LONNIE DONEGAN (Singer): (Singing) Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight? If your mother said don't chew it, do you swallow it in spite?
Mr. SZWED: Which originally every superstar in rock and roll played at the time and every one of them knows his name. Dylan has sung his praises, Van Morrison, any number of other people, even The Beatles and The Stones.
So, I suppose you had to put down something into all these since it would be that he made folk music popular music.
RAZ: That's John Szwed. He's a professor of music and jazz studies at Columbia University and the author of the new book, "Alan Lomax." He joined us from New York.
John Szwed, thank you so much.
Mr. SZWED: Thank you for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
RAZ: All right. The wait is over. We've received your letters and Round Six of Three-Minute Fiction is now open here on the weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. We've got a new judge and a new challenge to start off the New Year. Now, if you've missed any of the previous rounds or you're not familiar with the contest, it's pretty simple.
We're looking for original short fiction that can be read in under three minutes. So the story can't be longer than 600 words. And each round, we have a new judge who throws out a challenge. Last time, it was the novelist Michael Cunningham, and he asked that each story begin: Some people swore that the house was haunted. And we saw a record-breaking number of entries in that last round, over 5,000 original stories.
Now, it's time for Round Six, and with me is our newest judge to take the helm. It's the novelist and short story writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She's the author of the critically acclaimed books "Purple Hibiscus" and "Half of a Yellow Sun."
Chimamanda, are you there?
Ms. CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (Author, "Purple Hibiscus," "Half of a Yellow Sun"): I am. Yes.
RAZ: Thank you so much for agreeing to judge this round. We are so excited about this.
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: It's my pleasure.
RAZ: And I should say it's particularly exciting to have you do this contest because your last book, and we actually interviewed you on the program about this book, was a collection of short stories. What have you been up to since we last spoke?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: I have been pretending to be working on a new novel.
RAZ: (Laughing) You say pretending because?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: Well, because I'm always terrified about talking about work in progress because then it means there's something - there's a kind of a terrifying certainty about it because then people expect you to produce a book in a year or two. And then when you don't, they wonder why you talked about working on a book. So I think it's just safer to say that I'm supposed to be working on a book and I'm pretending to be working on a book just in case nothing results in the end.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: But in the meantime, you had some great news. This year, you had a piece that came out in a book published by The New Yorker. It was called "20 Under 40," so 20 stories by authors under the age of 40. And your story in there was called "Birdsong." That story was actually singled out by Alan Cheuse, who's the book reviewer for ALL THINGS CONSIDERED during the week. Can you tell us about that story?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: "Birdsong" is set in Lagos, in Nigeria. And for a long time, I've wanted to write a story in which the city of Lagos itself is a character because it's such a fascinating city in its extremes and its contradictions. And also, I wanted to write about what it is to be a young female - youngish, really - sort of late 20s and early 30s - working in a city like Lagos and then falling in love with a man who isn't necessarily right for you.
So, really, the story is about things I had observed, some personal experiences and very much wanting to try and capture Lagos in a story.
RAZ: Chimamanda, as somebody who has written a lot of short fiction, what do you make of the challenge of writing something under 600 words that has to be read in three minutes?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: I think it's a really difficult thing to do well and to pull off, as the Americans would say. But also, it's interesting, because what it forces you to do is that it forces you to go down to the essentials and to what really matters. Because sometimes, you find that stories have a lot of padding. I, for example, know that sometimes before I read my stories aloud at readings, I find myself editing with a pencil.
RAZ: You mean editing things that have already been published?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: Yes. And then you start to think, well, maybe this doesn't actually belong in the story, maybe this is superfluous. So I think that writing a story in 600 words is a challenge. But I think it's a fantastic thing for a writer because it really forces you to make choices about what the story really needs and what really matters and what's essential.
RAZ: Well, I think you're the perfect judge for this competition, and you're following in a long line of illustrious judges: James Wood and Michael Cunningham and Ann Patchett and Alan Cheuse. As we've done with each round, Chimamanda, we asked you to come up with a challenge for Round Six of Three-Minute Fiction. And so, as you know, in previous rounds, the stories had to include certain words like plant and button.
Last round, each story had to begin: Some people swore that the house was haunted. And I can tell you, after reading through thousands of stories that begin with "some people swore that the house was haunted," I never want to read that line again.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: What's your challenge? What are you throwing out to our listeners this round?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: The challenge this round is that one character must tell a joke and one character must cry at some point in the story. And it can be the same character who does both, but crying and telling a joke must be done.
RAZ: So, in those 600 words, a joke has to be told and somebody has to cry. It can be the same person and the crying doesn't necessarily have to be sad crying.
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: No, it doesn't. No. Certainly not.
RAZ: Why these two different emotions? Why crying and laughter?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: Well, I think for one thing, I find that I'm sort of very unapologetically old-fashioned in my tastes in fiction, which is that in fiction I'm interested in character and in emotion. I think that's really, for me, what fiction is about. And I think the ability to cry and the ability to laugh, for me, is in some ways what defines humanity and, you know, joy and sorrow, really.
I find that I'm drawn to fiction that can do both. And to try and do that in 600 words, I think, would just be very interesting to see.
RAZ: So what are you going to be looking for in these stories, Chimamanda?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: I'm hoping I will be entertained. But really, again, just the idea of a story that tries to grapple with human emotion. I would also like to see character. It would be lovely if there was an inventive use of language. It would be fantastic if all three were done, but also, it would be unusual.
RAZ: I think that you're going to have to actually try this challenge yourself.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: I often say no to judging fiction because I think it's a really difficult thing to do. I think that fiction, you know, that for me, literature is this huge house with so many different rooms, and there are so many different styles of writing that it's so difficult to judge and say this is better than that, right? But the wonderful thing about having an opportunity to judge something like this, which is, you know, more fun than the usual judging, is that I don't have to do it myself because I'm not sure that I could do it well, actually, if I did it myself.
RAZ: Right. You're going to have people from this program helping you out. And so, we're going to narrow those stories down. You're not going to have to read the thousands that will come in, but you'll read, you know, several hundred of them. So, not an easy task.
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: No, but one that I think will be exciting and interesting and also hopefully will nurture my own writing.
RAZ: That's actually a good point. All right. So let's recap, Chimamanda. This is Round Six of Three-Minute Fiction, and it is now open. We are accepting submissions until - let me check here - 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, January 23rd. We have to be able to read your stories out loud in three minutes or less, so no more than 600 words per story. And, Chimamanda, just remind us one more time of the challenge for this round.
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: One character must tell a joke and one character must cry.
RAZ: Okay. One character has to tell a joke, one character has to cry. There's only one entry allowed per person. To send in your story, go to our website, that's npr.org/threeminutefiction. That's Three-Minute Fiction all spelled out no spaces. You can find the full rules at our website as well.
And as in previous rounds, we'll be posting some of our favorites on the website each week as we begin to narrow it down. We'll be checking in with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie every few weeks as well to find out which stories have caught her eye. The winning story will be read on the air in its entirety, and the winner will receive a signed copy of Chimamanda's book "The Thing Around Your Neck."
So, Chimamanda, any final words of advice before listeners decide whether or not to get in there?
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: I think they should just have fun with it and not take it too seriously, because sometimes the best fiction comes out from a very light touch.
RAZ: That's the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is the judge of Round Six of our Three-Minute Fiction contest, which is now open.
Chimamanda, thank you.
Ms. NGOZI ADICHIE: Thank you.
RAZ: And once again, to submit your story, visit our website, npr.org/threeminutefiction, that's all spelled out with no spaces.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
GUY RAZ, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, is in critical condition at this moment just hours after she was shot at close range during a public event in Tucson. At least 12 other people were shot, including a federal judge and a member of Giffords' staff when a gunman open fire on a crowd gathered around the congresswoman. She was holding a town hall meeting on a Tucson street corner, an event she regular holds. It's called Congress on the Corner.
Our correspondent in Tucson is Ted Robbins and he's been following this story.
Ted, first, tell us what happened today.
TED ROBBINS: Guy, this was an event called Congress On Your Corner. It was in front of a Safeway market, a grocery store with banners, and congresswoman and several prominent people were sitting at a table and answering questions when a gunman apparently walked up and began firing, we're told, with a pistol and an extended clip.
And the word we have from the Pima County Sheriff's Office is that 18 people were wounded, six people were killed, including one child.
RAZ: What do we know about Congresswoman Giffords' condition at the moment?
ROBBINS: Well, as you mentioned, she was shot in close - at close range and we are - the reports are that it was in the head. And she was in surgery at University Medical Center in trauma. And one report says that she's expected to live, but she clearly - we don't know, you know, what that means at this point.
RAZ: Ted, do we have any information about the gunman?
ROBBINS: The sheriff's department is saying that it was a 22-year-old and - who had one minor run-in with the law between the ages of 18 and 22. The AP is identifying him as Jared Loughner.
He was alone and we don't know - I mean, they were looking for several gunmen as a matter of fact. But now they say that he was the only gunman. But they don't know how he got to the site, which is in northwest Tucson, actually out of city limits, but at a major shopping center. So they're looking for folks who he may have been in conspiracy with or whatever. But he was the only shooter.
RAZ: Ted, what can you tell us about the other victims?
ROBBINS: Well, as I said, one child, a 10-year-old. By the way, I should add the shooter was tackled and he is in custody, tackled by people on the scene. So we want to make sure that people understand he's in custody.
The other report is that, all the sheriff will say that it was a federal employee. But we have reliable reports that say it was John Roll, who is the presiding judge, federal judge for Arizona. And he was with her and along with at least one member of her staff, several people who were prominent there. Now we were - we have reports that he was killed.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. That's NPR's Ted Robbins in Tucson reporting for us.
Ted, thank you.
ROBBINS: Yes, of course.
GUY RAZ, host:
Gabrielle Giffords was elected to Congress in 2006 at age 36, one of the youngest members of her freshman class. Back then, she told my colleague Melissa Block about her fondest memory of the freshman orientation.
(Soundbite of archived broadcast)
Representative GABRIELLE GIFFORDS (Democrat, Arizona): Probably when we first had a candlelight tour of the Capitol our first evening. To think that only 109 groups of men and women have come before this class. And when you think about the fact that we have a representative democracy, you see that in this freshman class. We have a farmer, ranchers. They have an attorney, a doctor, I think a mortician, myself a tire dealer. So you really see a cross section of America.
RAZ: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED has followed Giffords regularly since she was elected, including on the day she arrived to Washington to start her congressional career in 2007.
Rep. GIFFORDS: You know, I got dropped off this morning at the airport in a '63 Chevy pick-up truck, got my cowboy boots, met up with my fianc�. Just life's good. And I'm very, very excited and so optimistic about taking our country in a new direction.
RAZ: And once she arrived to her Capitol office, she took to settling in.
Rep. GIFFORDS: Hey, how are you?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Woman: All right.
Rep. GIFFORDS: So maybe you can help us move the furniture around a little bit.
Unidentified Man: Yeah, where would you want it?
Rep. GIFFORDS: I don't know. We need good feng shui.
RAZ: Giffords grew up in Tucson, Arizona. And just last year, she told NPR her favorite summer job as a kid had been cleaning horse stalls.
(Soundbite of archived broadcast)
Rep. GIFFORDS: I loved cleaning out the stalls, and I did that in exchange for riding lessons. And I continue to ride most of my life. And I learned a lot from horses and the stable people. There was a unique culture out there, and I think it provided good training, all of that manure-shoveling, for my days in politics ahead.
RAZ: Giffords is considered part of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of fiscally conservative Democrats. And as recently as this past week as Congress prepare for a new Republican majority, she spoke with my colleague Robert Siegel who asked what she would do as Republicans proceed with their agenda.
(Soundbite of archived broadcast)
Rep. GIFFORDS: First and foremost, work with the Republicans. I come from the state of Arizona, which is a pretty bipartisan state. I formerly served in the minority, know what it's like to work with my Republicans in the majority and in the minority. And that's truly what the American people want.
GUY RAZ, host:
Joining us now is Congressman Raul Grijalva. He's from Arizona's 7th congressional district.
Congressman, thank you for being with us in this obviously...
Representative RAUL GRIJALVA (Democrat, Arizona): Thank you.
RAZ: ...difficult time. First of all...
Rep. GRIJALVA: It's a horrible time.
RAZ: First of all, your reaction to the news from today.
Rep. GRIJALVA: It's horrific. It is saddening. It is frightening at so many levels. And we're happy to hear that Gabby is - Congresswoman Giffords' - the medical staff at the hospital are optimistic about her recovery after surgery. And so, that is good news. The horrible news is that people have died and some of her staff were killed.
And, you know, it - for all of us that enter this public life, it's a commentary on the fact that we entered it to try to do public service. But if we didn't enter it, it's a life and death situation. So it's a striking reminder of the times that we're in and the tenor of our times.
RAZ: Congressman Grijalva, Gabrielle Giffords was threatened in the past. Her office was vandalized before. Did she ever express any concern to you about that?
Rep. GRIJALVA: We both talked about it. You know, we both, you know, I had - we suffered those threats. We had - my office had one of the windows shot out and she had the same thing. And we talked about it, but never with the sense of, you know, that she shouldn't be out there and she shouldn't be accessible. I mean, she never spoke about that. And, you know, that's part of this democracy, that people should know who their representative is and have an opportunity to talk to them.
But, yeah, we talked about it. And, no, I think we also talked about the tone, it was ugly and hateful every time we went to any public setting. And unfortunately, I don't think Arizona is unique. It might be more intense, but it's not unique to what's happening across this country.
RAZ: Clearly, Congressman Grijalva, she's a fighter. She narrowly won her last race in a tough swing district and clearly fighting for her life right now.
Rep. GRIJALVA: Yes. And her future is in front of her and we all hope she have that opportunity to realize that future because it's in front of her. And she is not only a fighter, but she's tough. And I think both those are going to serve her well right now.
RAZ: And we're obviously all praying for her.
Congressman Grijalva, thank you so much.
Rep. GRIJALVA: Thank you.
RAZ: That's Congressman Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona's 7th congressional district.
Joining us now as well is former Congressman John Shadegg, a Republican from Arizona's 4th district.
Congressman, thank you for joining us.
Mr. JOHN SHADEGG (Former Republican Representative, Arizona): My pleasure.
RAZ: First of all, your reaction to this tragedy today.
Mr. SHADEGG: Well, I am stunned and shocked and deeply, deeply saddened that yet another incident of this type has occurred with a shooting or an attack on public officials. Gabby Giffords is an energetic, bright, capable representative, and she and her staff worked hard to represent the people of her congressional district. And I always enjoyed working with her. She was someone that could - you could work with easily across the aisle. And I just pray for her speedy recovery, and pray that as few other people as possible have been either injured or lost their lives.
RAZ: John Shadegg, can you tell me a little bit about the atmosphere in Arizona, in her district at the moment? I mean, was it - has it been a charged environment?
Mr. SHADEGG: Well, I would say that the issue of immigration and the failure of the federal government to, quote, unquote, "secure the border" has been an intense issue in Arizona. And as the economy has turned downward, that intensity has increased. I don't know if it's anymore so in her district than any other district here in Arizona, but it clearly is a hot issue.
In addition to that, this kind of incident unfortunately is, quite frankly, almost routine in the sense of a threat. I don't know many members of Congress who in their tenure have not received at least some kind of a threat. I had two or three different death threats over my tenure in Congress. I had my home vandalized at one point in time, and I think my staff was threatened far more often than that because they would be threatened on occasion when they were in Washington - they were in Phoenix in my office and I was out in Washington. It is much more common than you think.
Fortunately, in the vast majority of incidences, it goes nowhere. And that's what distinguishes this incident is that like other tragic events, the Columbine shooting or the Oklahoma City bombing, this one went one step further. And it's tragic.
RAZ: That's John Shadegg, a Republican, former congressman from Arizona's 4th district, speaking to us from his home in Phoenix.
John Shadegg, thank you.
Mr. SHADEGG: You bet.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
And we're continuing to follow the news today of that shooting in Tucson, Arizona, which claimed the lives of at least six people and has left Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in critical condition. President Obama spoke about the shooting this evening.
President BARACK OBAMA: It's not surprising that today, Gabby was doing what she always does - listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors. That is the essence of what our democracy is all about. That is why this is more than a tragedy for those involved. It is a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy for our entire country.
RAZ: James Fallows of The Atlantic normally joins me here on Saturdays under less tragic circumstances.
And, Jim, I'm wondering what your immediate thoughts on the shooting of Congressman Giffords are?
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, The Atlantic): Well, of course, this is terrible news and we have to extend our sympathies to everybody involved in this and it's just, you know, tragic. Also, I think it's important to emphasize, as most news media have, that we just don't know very much about this circumstance.
RAZ: Indeed.
Mr. FALLOWS: You know, who did it and for what reason. What struck me, though, is we have in the United States a long and unfortunately rich tradition of political violence. And on the one hand, any attack on a politician it seems to me is by definition political, because that's how that person came into public view. But it's striking how often the motives for the crime seem to be obscure or really hard to connect to mainstream political activities.
For example, the only other congressman to - the only congressman so far to have been killed in the line of duty, Leo Ryan at Jonestown more than 30 years ago. That was for cult reasons as opposed to any kind of normal political circumstance...
RAZ: He had gone down to Guyana to check up on these members of the cult and was shot as he walked down the tarmac.
Mr. FALLOWS: Indeed. And when George Wallace was paralyzed by Arthur Bremer in '72 and whatever motivation Sirhan Sirhan might have had with Robert Kennedy, it was - it had huge political consequences but was not directly - that the motives seem to be as much a mental disorder or personal politics as anything else. And so we don't know how that will finally parse out here.
RAZ: Mm-hmm. Jim, Giffords - sorry.
Mr. FALLOWS: I just was going to say one other thing too. There - it may be the case that certainly, there are times in American history where the mood and tone of political rhetoric becomes more violence-tinged than at other times. And I think we have seen that in the last year or two. And there was this famous poster put out this last summer by the Sarah Palin political action committee, which had targets on the seats of 20 congresspeople they wanted to defeat, including Congresswoman Giffords.
RAZ: Including Giffords, yeah.
Mr. FALLOWS: And so, perhaps, there will be less of that tone.
RAZ: And I wanted to ask you about that, Jim, because Giffords, who's a Democrat, was narrowly reelected in November. It was a tough fight. I mean, she won by fewer than 4,000 votes in a pretty politically charged district, where as we just heard from Congressman Shadegg, immigration is a hot-button issue and Republicans had hoped, almost expected to defeat her.
Mr. FALLOWS: Yes. And she was one of the, you know, one of the people who had supported the Obama health care plan and the financial rescue plans and still won this very tough election in what is becoming increasingly - which has been a polarized state. And I think this has been testimony to, as other people have said, her essential centrism and popularity. And she is married to an active service member and an astronaut. And she has been very moderate on many issues. And so that she would perhaps, for reasons we don't know, be the target of this kind of political violence is all the more striking and tragic.
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. He joins us here on the program on Saturdays. You can read his blog at jamesfallows.theatlantic.com.
Jim, as always, thank you very much.
Mr. FALLOWS: Thank you, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
A few years ago, an IBM computer beat Garry Kasparov on a chess match. The question is, can a computer become a "Jeopardy!" champion? IBM seems pretty confident it can.
Four years ago, the company started to work on a computer they called Watson. And programmers have been fine-tuning it ever since. And in about a month, Watson will make its debut appearance on "Jeopardy!," playing against two of the most formidable players of all time.
David Ferrucci is IBM's chief scientist behind Watson.
Dr. DAVID FERRUCCI (Researcher; Senior Manager, IBM T.J. Watson's Research Center): Watson will appear like to the audience as essentially a screen, a screen of some form where there's a design on that screen and it reacts to Watson's different states, whether it's sort of thinking or speaking. And that's all you'll see at the podium.
Off stage are the actual computers, the hardware that is trying to understand and answer the questions.
RAZ: How does Watson know the answers? I mean, there are an infinite number of topics, questions that could be asked. I mean, is he just loaded with information? Does he have access to infinite data?
Dr. FERRUCCI: No, it doesn't. In fact, Watson, when he plays "Jeopardy!," is completely self-contained.
RAZ: Not connected to the Internet?
Dr. FERRUCCI: Not connected to the Internet. Moreover, I mean, think about it, even if you were connected to the Internet and you got - looked at the top 10, 20 documents, let's say the answer was in there somewhere, how do you know what the right answer is?
RAZ: Right.
Dr. FERRUCCI: You have to have a deeper understanding. And that's where all sort of the analytics come in, these algorithms that run in his hardware to analyze all that data from lots of different dimensions to decide I think this answer is more right than this other one, and I'm going to compute for the probability.
RAZ: David, let me play a clip of Watson. This is a sort of a trial run on "Jeopardy!" answering the question correctly.
Unidentified Man: You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. On July 28, 1994, this Texas ranger with a familiar name did. Watson?
WATSON: What is Kenny Rogers?
Unidentified Man: That is correct. Once again, Watson...
RAZ: He's talking about Kenny Rogers, a baseball player, not Kenny Rogers the singer who sang that song. So that was a trick question. How did Watson figure that out?
Dr. FERRUCCI: Watson looks at the different parts of the clue and looks at the date, looks at the names, looks at the times that were referred to and pieces it all together. So it may find many, many documents that refers - use various elements in the clue, so it's got to knit all those pieces of information together.
RAZ: But there are cases when it gets a wrong. For example, there is the question to identify the people with the initials L.B. in the R.E.M. song "It's the End of the World As We Know It." And here's how Watson replied.
Unidentified Man: In R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World As We Know It," two of the men with the initials L.B. Watson?
WATSON: What is I feel fine?
Unidentified Man: Ooh, no.
RAZ: I feel fine is a lyric in the song, Dave.
Dr. FERRUCCI: Right.
RAZ: And as an R.E.M. fan, I should say the answer was it could have been Lester Bangs, Lenny Bruce, Leonid Brezhnev, Leonard Bernstein. Have you guys worked out the kinks?
Dr. FERRUCCI: So I guess Watson is not an R.E.M. fan.
RAZ: No, he's not an R.E.M. fan.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: But they listen to this show, so they're not going to be happy to hear that.
Dr. FERRUCCI: I think that's one worry. It's really not understanding the clue. It's not interpreting the need for those initials, or it's not weighing that enough. And this is an example of Watson looking, again, sort of many different dimensions of the clue and what it's reading and analyzing. Putting it all together in the end, then that isn't favoring the right answer.
RAZ: So now you guys are clearly confident in all the refining you've done over the years that you're taking Watson to "Jeopardy!" You're going to put it up against two of the best "Jeopardy!" players of all time: Ken Jennings, he had the longest winning streak; Brad Rutter, he won the most money. Who should I put my money on?
Dr. FERRUCCI: I couldn't tell. That wouldn't be fair if I told you that. What I could tell you is that Watson wins and loses. We've played a series of 55 sparring matches here at IBM against former Tournament of Champion players.
And while we can't release that record yet, I can tell you that, you know, Watson did well enough to give it his television debut. I could also tell you it won and it lost. So it's going to be an interesting, and I think, at least for me, edge of my seat contest.
RAZ: That's David Ferrucci, the scientist who led the team that created the IBM computing system Watson, which is set to appear on "Jeopardy!" next month.
David, thank you.
Dr. FERRUCCI: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Every sport has its ironman, guys who keep playing for years and years without taking a break. Cal Ripken Jr. in baseball, there was Brett Favre in football. But let's talk about an iron woman.
This past week, Kristine Lilly announced her retirement after more than 24 years as a member of the U.S. national women's soccer team. She played in 352 international games. That's more than any player - male or female - in the history of the sport.
Now when Kristine Lilly became pregnant with her daughter a few years ago, that's when she first thought it might be time to hang up the cleats.
Ms. KRISTINE LILLY (Soccer Player): I remember thinking, I don't want to.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Ms. LILLY: So I went through the pregnancy and came back. And the Women's Professional League was starting up in 2009, so it gave me a great opportunity to compete in that. And I did for the two years, and then now I hit my point where I'm ready.
RAZ: Have you put a soccer ball in front of your daughter?
Ms. LILLY: Oh, she's got plenty of soccer balls.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LILLY: We're throwing golf clubs in there now.
RAZ: Kristine, you hold another record, which is that you're both the youngest and the oldest player to score goals for team USA. What do you remember about that first one? You were still in high school back then.
Ms. LILLY: A lot of the other girls in the team were in college. So back then, I thought they were so old. We were like, oh, my god, the college girls.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Ms. LILLY: There is a couple of young ones, myself, Mia Hamm, Julie Foudy and Joy Fawcett.
RAZ: Now legendary names.
Ms. LILLY: Exactly. And then I got an opportunity to get in the second game, and I remember a ball was played into Carin Jennings-Gabarra and she flicked it and I ran onto it and I - it was kind of like a half-volley. So if you're familiar with soccer, that's always something you love to hit. And I hit it, and it went over the keeper. And I was just so excited.
RAZ: Wow. Who are you guys playing?
Ms. LILLY: I think we were playing China.
RAZ: Hmm. And of course, there was another moment with China, probably one of the most memorable moments in women's soccer, the U.S. victory over China in the World Cup back in 1999. Ninety thousand people...
Ms. LILLY: Yeah.
RAZ: ...who packed into the Rose Bowl to watch that final match - I remember it so clearly - and of course, that moment at the end where you guys ripped off your jerseys, your tops.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: I'm sure that you've told the story thousands of times, but can you describe what that was like?
Ms. LILLY: Well, the World Cup in '99 was amazing because in the beginning, they didn't think that we could sell out the stadiums. They wanted to put us in small venues. So we fought and said, you know what, why not try the big ones? So we had our tails on the line with that. And from the first game to the last, we sold out stadiums and, you know, it just came a snowball effect.
So many people were coming to watch. They're watching us on TV. We walk through airports and everyone would be clapping.
RAZ: That's amazing.
Ms. LILLY: And then we get to, you know, the Rose Bowl for the final and it goes into overtime and then goes to penalty kicks. So talk about the most suspenseful game and the storybook kind of ending, and of course we win, so that was even better.
But it was one of those moments after I took a penalty kick and scored and I was like, okay, relieved. And then, I became nervous for my teammates. So when Brandi shot that last kick and it went in, it was just complete elation.
RAZ: And Brandi, of course, is Brandi Chastain.
Ms. LILLY: Correct. Everything just was off our shoulders and we were just so happy.
RAZ: Yeah. It was an amazing, amazing moment. What are your plans now? Do you think you're going to stay affiliated with soccer in some way?
Ms. LILLY: I think definitely. I mean, I can retire from the game, but I don't think I could leave the game. You know, I run my own camps in Connecticut, Kristine Lilly Soccer Academy, for the last 14, 15 years. And I'm in the start of the process of writing a book.
RAZ: Oh, cool. And I imagine that the scouts are already knocking on your door asking about your daughter?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LILLY: I already contacted Anson at the University of North Carolina to let her know if he's still around that I would love her to go there.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: That's Kristine Lilly. She retired this week after 24 years with the U.S. women's national soccer team.
Kristine, thanks. And best of luck to you.
Ms. LILLY: Thank you so much, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
Back to our top story this hour. We've been covering the shooting today of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords while she was meeting with constituents in a Tucson parking lot. As a result of today's shootings, security has been increased at Congresswoman Giffords' home and offices and also at the offices of other lawmakers in the Arizona delegation.
Joining me now is NPR's congressional reporter Audie Cornish.
Audie, what are you hearing about the safety of other lawmakers from Capitol Police?
AUDIE CORNISH: Well, right now, the Capitol Police are saying that they're actively monitoring the event. They obviously don't have jurisdiction. The local sheriff's office in Arizona is dealing with that. And the Capitol Police say that from what they know that there's no indication that this was part of any sort of larger threat against congressional leadership. They're also saying that they haven't - for now - that they don't see it as being part of any kind of act of terrorism but obviously an investigation is ongoing.
They're asking for lawmakers to reach out to them if they need additional security, which as you heard from Representative Raul Grijalva in Arizona, he is doing. He's called for greater security...
RAZ: Right.
CORNISH: ...for his staff. He's also reported that a community center in his district has had some windows destroyed. And I think lawmakers are very sensitive right now to any kind of perceived acts of violence, obviously.
At this point, if you were at the Capitol today, obviously, it's the weekend and lawmakers have gone home, like Congresswoman Giffords.
RAZ: Right.
CORNISH: But there were some staffers in the building. I've seen reports that there are a dozen yellow flowers sitting outside of her office door. We're also getting statements pouring in from leadership of both parties, many of them calling this a senseless act of violence and a few calling it political violence. And I think people are being very careful about using that kind of terminology.
RAZ: We just don't know yet.
CORNISH: There's no word about the motivation of the suspect.
RAZ: Audie, talk a little bit about Gabrielle Giffords, widely respected on both sides of the aisle, a Democrat.
CORNISH: Yeah. She's 40 years old. She was just reelected to her third term this past fall. She is a classic Blue Dog Democrat, I mean, just a - in a centrist right down the middle. She's somebody who is pro-choice but also somebody who - a good example is the immigration debate. You know, her district shares 100 miles of border with Mexico.
RAZ: With Mexico, yeah.
CORNISH: And this has obviously been a very big and heated time for the immigration debate in Arizona. To the left of her, you had lawmakers who were calling up boycott for the state over the state laws targeting illegal immigrants. And to the right of her, you had people supporting that law. And she said this goes too far but Arizona is being a leader in trying to do something.
She was also pro-choice. And she was also someone who was a supporter for gun rights.
RAZ: And on that point, Audie, I have a clip of tape, a conversation she had with our colleague Robert Siegel last May from ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, talking about that issue. Let's play that.
(Soundbite of archived broadcast)
Representative GABRIELLE GIFFORDS (Democrat, Arizona): In my district and in my state, we have a very strong gun culture. I own a gun, members of my family own guns, and it's just not likely to happen. I'm not disagreeing that assault weapons are incredibly problematic, specifically for the law enforcement community and specific cities across the country. But the reality is that I am urging the federal government to put national troops on the border.
CORNISH: This is a perfect example of the kind of stance she might have. This is a lawmaker who, her district is - went by 52 percent to John McCain in 2008, and she won it by 1 percent in 2010. And she was one of those lawmakers who many thought - Blue Dogs who would not make it through this election where Democrats like her had a very difficult time.
RAZ: Well, obviously, we're all praying for her to pull through this. Audie Cornish, that's NPR's congressional reporter Audie Cornish here with me in the studio.
Audie, thank you so much.
CORNISH: Thank you.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, host:
And finally tonight, an update on those shootings in Arizona that left U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords in critical condition at a Tucson hospital. She was shot in the head, but a surgeon at the hospital where she was taken this afternoon expressed optimism that she would recover.
Others, however, died in that shooting, including a federal judge, an aide to the congresswoman and a 9-year-old child.
Giffords was among at least 10 people who were wounded in a shooting that occurred while the congresswoman was holding one of her regular meetings with constituents in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson. Police say that the shooter has been taken into custody and that he's been identified as 22-year-old Jared Loughner.
The 40-year-old Giffords was reelected to her third term last November. Before coming to Washington, she was a member of the Arizona House and Senate. She is married to astronaut Mark Kelly, who piloted the Space Shuttles Endeavor and Discovery. President Obama called the shootings not only a tragedy for Arizona but also for the United States.
And for Saturday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Please keep those folks in Arizona in your thoughts this evening. We're back on the radio tomorrow. Until then, thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
This past week, the British Medical Journal released a report calling a 1998 study linking vaccines to autism a, quote, "absolute fraud."
The man who led that study, Andrew Wakefield, was already stripped of his medical license in Britain last year, and the journal that published his work, Lancet, retracted it, as well. Wakefield offered his reaction on CNN earlier in the week.
Mr. ANDREW WAKEFIELD: What it is is a ruthless, pragmatic attempt to crush any investigation into valid vaccine safety concerns...
RAZ: Wakefield's study unleashed a powerful anti-vaccine movement in Europe and in the United States. Many parents, worried about reports of a link between vaccines and developmental disorders, chose and continue to choose not to have their kids immunized.
One of those parents was Kelly Lacek. And one night, in April, 2006, Kelly and her husband were on their way out to a church dance near their home outside Pittsburgh. Before they left, their youngest son, 3-year-old Matthew, complained of a sore throat. At first, the Laceks didn't think much of it.
Ms. KELLY LACEK: So we just made sure he was okay. We went to the dance. And then when we got back, he was laboring to breathe. He was, like, hunched over and was laboring to breathe. We figured, oh, we'll just take him to the local hospital, which is Forest Regional.
RAZ: As his fever reached 104, doctors gave Matthew Tylenol and tried to help ease his congestion. They thought it might be asthma. But the treatments weren't helping.
Ms. LACEK: It was actually more of a seasoned or veteran doctor that came in too. And then, the gentleman had asked me, after he looked at him, and said: Did you have your son vaccinated?
And at that point, you know, I said no. And then he knew exactly at that point, exactly what it was. And he said: If this is what I think it is, he doesn't have that much time to live.
RAZ: The doctor determined Matthew had Hib, a potentially deadly bacterial disease that leads to meningitis. Before the vaccine came onto the market in 1985, a thousand children under age 3 died from it each year. Since then, it's been virtually eradicated. But in recent years, it's returned to children who have not received the Hib vaccine. In Matthew's case, the clock was ticking. No one was sure whether he'd live.
Ms. LACEK: By Tuesday, he was starting - his blood pressure and his heart rate were fluctuating, and it was just really hard. We weren't sure if we were going to lose him or not.
This is the first time I actually cried. Sorry. So at that point, you know, the doctors, the young doctors were there, and we would just whisper in his ear. And you can just see the tears coming down his face because he wasn't able to communicate with us.
RAZ: Matthew spent six days in the hospital. Finally, on a Tuesday afternoon, after high doses of antibiotics, he came out of a medically induced coma, and his breathing tube was removed.
Ms. LACEK: They took the tube out, and as soon as it came out, you know, his -he was just learning to go to the bathroom at that point, and he said: I have to go potty. And then his favorite movie was on TV, and he just wanted to watch the movie.
RAZ: Amazingly, Matthew recovered. Today, he's 7. He has no lasting brain damage or developmental effects. And at the time, this is what the lead doctor said to Kelly Lacek.
Ms. LACEK: Please do me a favor. When, you know, you make a decision with your husband to get him vaccinated right away. But he said he's a one in a million child that came out of this with, you know, nothing wrong with him.
RAZ: Kelly Lacek's story is told in the new book by Journalist Seth Mnookin. It's called "The Panic Virus." Over the past two years, a record number of children have been diagnosed with pertussis or whooping cough, a disease that was virtually eradicated with the vaccine. Same with measles.
And Mnookin wanted to get to the bottom of the phenomenon, why so many educated parents choose to either not vaccinate their children or to wait on them.
Mr. SETH MNOOKIN (Author, "The Panic Virus"): When I started working on the book, I really had no sense, one way or another, what the reality of the situation was.
And I started to hear a lot about it both in the media and from my friends, from my peers who were young parents or having children and were also very concerned with this.
So as I looked into it and researched it, I found interest in the way people justified themselves relying on instinct and intuition, as opposed to research and facts.
RAZ: So to you, there is no debate, that to have someone on - who would make a counter-argument that would say, yes, vaccines are dangerous, that's an illegitimate argument in your view because the science doesn't back it up. There is no debate.
Mr. MNOOKIN: Yes. I think at this point, this is probably the issue regarding public health that has received more attention from scientists and researchers around the world than any other single issue. We're sort of at an asked-and-answered juncture of this.
RAZ: In 2010, the journal Pediatrics released a poll. It showed that 25 percent - this was last year - 25 percent of parents believe vaccines can cause developmental disorders in healthy kids.
I know that you're a parent. I'm a parent. I've got a kid who has been vaccinated. But, you know, I have to admit, every time I took him to the doctor, in the back of my mind, there was that thought. Did you ever have that?
Mr. MNOOKIN: Absolutely. And I think that that is very understandable. And in fact, I think one of the reasons we've gotten to this point is because for too long, the medical community and the public health community treated parents who came in and had concerns as if they were crazy, as if they almost had no right to bring this up.
RAZ: You have a chapter in the book about Jenny McCarthy, the actress. It's called "Jenny's McCarthy's Mommy Instinct." And she, of course, is an outspoken vaccination critic, and I want to play a clip of her. This is her appearance on Larry King in 2008.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Larry King Live")
Ms. JENNY McCARTHY (Actress): Well, the schedule back in 1983 was 10 shots given. Today, there are 36 shots given.
Mr. LARRY KING (Host, "Larry King live"): You think that's too many?
Ms. McCARTHY: Too many, too soon. We need to get rid of the toxins; the mercury, which I'm so tired of everyone saying it's been removed; aluminum, ether, antifreeze. These are toxic ingredients in shots...
RAZ: Seth Mnookin, this is scary stuff to hear for any parent. How significant and important has Jenny McCarthy been for the anti-vaccination movement?
Mr. MNOOKIN: She has probably brought more attention to this over the last half-decade than any other single person. In that instance on Larry King, well, there isn't antifreeze in vaccines. Mercury has been removed from childhood vaccines. There is a mercury preservative that is in some variants of the flu vaccine.
This is one of those areas - people get bogged down in it, but the type of mercury was ethyl mercury, as opposed to methyl mercury, which is the mercury that we know can be very poisonous.
RAZ: And by the way, there has been no link found between the mercury and any developmental disorders.
Mr. MNOOKIN: I mean, not only that, there have been studies involving literally millions of children showing that there is no link.
Even if you put on Jenny McCarthy with someone from the CDC or a pediatrician, it gives the impression that there's sort of an equal number of people on two sides of this.
And for years, this was framed through a narrative of parents who believed that their children had been injured by vaccines, and that's a very compelling narrative and a very difficult one to counteract with research papers and scientists who sound as if they're speaking to graduate seminars.
RAZ: Given that 25 percent of parents are worried about whether vaccines can cause disorders, presumably, this is going to become a worse problem.
Mr. MNOOKIN: Well, I think there are a couple of reasons to be hopeful. The public health community and doctors are aware of the need to communicate more effectively in a way that they weren't a decade ago.
So in pediatrician's offices, there are now, oftentimes, informational pamphlets, vaccine seminars that are held after office hours. I think what is dangerous is opening up Google and typing in vaccines, autism. And so we need to make intelligent decisions about where we're going to get our information.
RAZ: That's Seth Mnookin. He's a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His new book is called "The Panic Virus: The True Story of Medicine, Science and Fear."
Seth Mnookin, thank you.
Mr. MNOOKIN: Thank you so much.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
The Bible wasn't the only legacy King James left behind, at least in Britain. There was also the aristocratic legacy: a world of landowners and their servants, and a way of life that lasted right up until the First World War.
Screenwriter Julian Fellowes portrayed that world in the acclaimed film "Gosford Park." He's done it again, this time for television, in the British series "Downton Abbey." It premieres on PBS tonight.
It's the story of the aristocratic Crawley family, known as the noble Granthams. And it takes place in the two years before the outbreak of World War I in 1914.
Mr. JULIAN FELLOWES (Screenwriter, "Downton Abbey"): They're not colossally rich, like Sir Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Roxburghe. That's not it. But they are senior earls. They are the earl and countess of Grantham, and they have three daughters.
They live in this house, which we chose quite deliberately. It's actually, in real life, a house called Highclere Castle, which is lived in by the earls of Carnarvon. But it's built as such a statement of aristocratic confidence.
You know, when you look at that house, nobody was scratching their head and worrying about their social position. This was a class that knew what it was there for. And we deliberately wanted that because the house, quite strongly, I think, is a character in the drama, really.
RAZ: Indeed. Yeah.
Mr. FELLOWES: They all sort of serve the house, in a way.
RAZ: Early on, we learn that the Crawleys are not fabulously - obviously, they're very wealthy, but there was a point before Robert Crawley, the earl, before he became the earl, he was in danger of losing Downton Abbey until he married his wife Cora, who is an American heiress. Were those kinds of marriages common at that time?
Mr. FELLOWES: Oh, enormously common. Because in Europe, to get an heiress, you basically need everyone else in the family to die, and then there's only one girl left, and she's a great heiress.
Well, naturally enough, that doesn't happen all that often. But the Americans don't believe in primogeniture, and they never have. And so when a man was enormously rich, he would make his daughters rich, as well as his sons.
RAZ: He would divide it up.
Mr. FELLOWES: He would divide it up. And so it meant that there were an enormous amount of American heiresses, as opposed to the European ones. And often, because they were very new money, they couldn't really get into society in New York or Cincinnati or Cleveland or whatever because the rules there would keep them out.
And so, the obvious thing to do was rather like in the novel by Edith Wharton, "A Custom of the Country," where Ms. Sprague comes over to England to get a title. And they would arrive, and their enormous fortunes would attract these elder sons of houses on the way down.
And, you know, in the end, something like 350 American heiresses came over between about 1880 and 1920 and married into the upper classes. You can't really imagine that now, can you?
RAZ: And that American heiress, Cora Crawley, is played brilliantly by the actress Elizabeth McGovern, and her mother-in-law, the matriarch of Downton Abbey, is the dowager countess. She is played by the amazing Maggie Smith.
And I don't want to give away too much of the plot because it is such an amazing series, but I am going to play a scene here, and in this one, the dowager countess reacts to news that a foreign visitor has died at Downton.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Downton Abbey")
Dame MAGGIE SMITH (Actor): (As Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham): I can't believe it. Last night he looked so well. Of course, it would happen to a foreigner. It's typical.
Ms. ELIZABETH McGOVERN (Actor): (As Cora, Countess of Grantham) Don't be ridiculous.
Dame MAGGIE SMITH: (As Violet) I'm not being ridiculous. No Englishman would dream of dying in someone else's house.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: I wonder whether you wrote this part with Maggie Smith in mind.
Mr. FELLOWES: I can say without question I wrote it for Maggie. And actually, it's our third time at the rodeo because she and I were in - I mean, I wrote "Gosford Park," she was in it. And then she was in a film I wrote and directed called "From Time to Time."
And there is just something about the way she plays these characters that suits the way I write them, really, because I think both of us are capable of feeling, but we're both rather unsentimental. And she as an actress has a wonderful dry wit behind everything she does.
She doesn't plead with the audience to like her. She gives you her performance, and if you like her, that's your business.
RAZ: In the house, the head butler, Mr. Carson, who's played by actor Jim Carter," he shows us fierce loyalty to the Crawleys, to the point where he scolds the staff for gossiping about them.
(Soundbite of TV show, "Downton Abbey")
Mr. ROB JAMES-COLLIER (Actor): (As Thomas) She's a match for the old lady. She wasn't going to give in.
Mr. JIM CARTER (Actor): (As Mr. Carson) What old lady are you referring to, Thomas? You cannot mean Her Ladyship the Dowager Countess, not if you wish to remain in this house.
Mr. JAMES-COLLIER: (As Thomas) No, Mr. Carson.
Mr. FELLOWES: You know, there are two great crimes for a servant. One is theft, and one is disloyalty and not being trustworthy, because these people are living in your house, and of course, in a day when they were helping you to dress and even bathe, and they were present at every dinner and luncheon and so on, the capacity for disloyalty was enormous.
So I don't think that Carson's loyalty is something that puzzles them, but what puzzles them is his love. But of course, you know, he has no other family.
RAZ: How much research goes into re-creating this world?
Mr. FELLOWES: When I was growing up, you know, I had great aunts and things. I mean, my oldest great aunt, who is sort of the original for Violet Grantham, Maggie Smith's character, you know, she was born in 1880.
She was presented in 1898. She was married in about 1905, and she - I knew her. She only died when I was 21. I was very lucky because I got interested while that generation was still alive.
Even my parents, you know, my father had an aunt called Lady Sidnum(ph), who was a very frightening character. My mother was absolutely terrified of her.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FELLOWES: And they used to stay, and she loathed women smoking. She thought it was the most ghastly thing. So she'd say to my mother: I hope you don't smoke, dear. And my mother, of course, would say: Oh, horrible habit. Certainly not. And of course she smoked like a chimney.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FELLOWES: So she used to wait until everyone had gone to bed, and then she'd sneak up to the room of the head housemaid, who also smoked illegally, and they would puff away together, leaning out of the window. And this particular housemaid was a big film buff, and all her walls were decorated with the covers of Photoplay, you know, and Screen and those magazines.
And, you know, this is the lovely thing about being a writer because I was able to put that character into Gosford as Elsie, the film-mad head housemaid. And so, in a sense, you have this kind of squirrel's pouch of stuff you've heard during your life. And, you know, when you get given the right project, then you can bring it out.
RAZ: There will be - you've announced that there will be a second season of "Downton Abbey." What can we expect?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FELLOWES: Oh, I don't think I could tell you that, Guy. I mean, I think I can say without too much letting down or letting the game away that it will be in the First World War when it begins, because we finished as the war broke out.
And of course, we will see how Downton has to be useful to the war effort and play its part and the different attitudes of the people in the house and, you know, who gets called up and who enlists and this and that and the other. So I think we've got quite a lot to be going on with, as they say.
RAZ: That's Julian Fellowes. He's the writer and creator of the British period drama "Downton Abbey." It premieres on the PBS program "Masterpiece Classic" tonight. The series continues through January 30th.
Julian, thank you so much.
Mr. FELLOWES: Oh, thank you.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, host:
Dance music was one of the most dominant forms of pop in 2010. And last year, one of the pioneers of electronica made a rare visit to the United States. Terre Thaemlitz spends most of his time performing in Europe and in Japan, where he lives. But the American-born producer returned home recently when a club owner convinced him to give a show here.
NPR's Sami Yenigun was there.
SAMI YENIGUN: I'm standing in the middle of a large wooden dance floor at the U Street Music Hall in Washington D.C., waiting for Terre Thaemlitz, aka DJ Sprinkles, to take the stage.
Thaemlitz emerges and asks: Are you ready to rock? The crowd is thrilled, answering with a resounding, yes, to which he replies: Then go to the 9:30 Club because this is a house show.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: This is how Thaemlitz describes his music.
Mr. TERRE THAEMLITZ (Musician): I think, you know, most of my music is made in the kind of anti-climactic way and very much involves boredom and a kind of non-performativity. And if there are kind of improvisational elements, it's kind of parodying the idea of gesture as a kind of rock format and critiquing that from both a transgendered and kind of feminist side.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: So it's less about a fun-filled night of dancing than it is about exposing the politics of the queer and transgender nightclubs of New York, where he started in the mid-'80s.
These were places of escape for the city's marginalized communities, says Jesse Dorris, an electronic producer working under the name the Mattachine Machine.
Mr. JESSE DORRIS (Electronic Producer): In the original house tracks, when they talk about escape, it's not escaping the work-a-day grind of your work week so that you can blow off steam and then go back to work in your office. It's about escaping very serious political structures that are pressing you and very serious gender strictures that are oppressing you and doing it with a sense of humor, doing it with a sense of glamour but nevertheless escaping very tight conditions.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: Dorris has been following Thaemlitz's music for almost 20 years.
Mr. DORRIS: As house music became something that was played in the superclubs, as it became something that you could make a lot of money off of, the house in house music, instead of a shelter, instead of something that you build to keep you out of a storm, the house became something that you take a holiday inside.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: Thaemlitz uses his compositions as a form of criticism.
Mr. THAEMLITZ: I'm more interested in the kind of urgency to end the unacceptable rather than this kind of yes-we-can, optimistic idea of cultural criticism that's always emphasizing what we'd like to see happen.
And for me, I think that gives very different results than trying to organize based on a real, critical analysis of what we are no longer able to tolerate.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: Every sample he uses musically footnotes his critiques. He's built his reputation on producing both dance tracks and electro-acoustic soundscapes. His latest project is a massive work.
Mr. THAEMLITZ: It's kind of the world's first full-length MP3 album is how I'm billing it, and it's going to be a little over 32 hours. And the core music piece is a 30-hour piano solo that takes up a four gigabyte single MP3 file and four gigabytes being the maximum file size that you can currently open on Windows and Mac computers.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: It's a commentary on the growing disparity between media formats and artists' wages.
Mr. THAEMLITZ: Album duration has always followed format limitations. So for example, albums used to be 40 minutes when they were on vinyl because you can master up to about 20 minutes per side.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. THAEMLITZ: And with a CD, it became 74 minutes, then 80 minutes in length. And as producers, we then instantly were producing 60 to 80-minute albums.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. THAEMLITZ: And then now in the MP3 download era, we have the length of the CD plus digital exclusive downloads, et cetera, et cetera. So we're always asked to produce more and more media but without any sort of change in compensation. And for me, this presents a kind of labor crisis within the audio production fields. And so I wanted to kind of focus on this and kind of explore, in the MP3 era, then what exactly is the album anymore?
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: Thaemlitz says that a lot of his criticism comes from perspectives that Americans have little patience for. He feels that the terms Marxist, materialist, socialist and transgender turn off audiences in the States.
(Soundbite of music)
YENIGUN: Why then fly half way around the world for this performance?
Mr. THAEMLITZ: That's the way we economically sustain ourselves because record sales are not a way to really support yourself.
YENIGUN: Fair enough. But if criticizing dominant power structures and mainstream channels of communication are so central to his work, I had to ask: Why did you agree to do this interview?
Mr. THAEMLITZ: There's definitely something hypocritical about my coming back to the U.S. and doing the interview when I lived here for so long and had absolutely no work or extremely little recognition. So if somebody asked me to do an interview, and, you know, they seem interested enough, then I'll give it a shot. And we'll see how you edit it up, what you do to it.
YENIGUN: Well, Terre, how'd I do? For NPR News, I'm Sami Yenigun.
GUY RAZ, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords remains in critical condition at a Tucson hospital after yesterday's shooting rampage that left six people dead.
Investigators are learning more about the massacre, and they've released some of the initial 911 calls that went out right after. And a warning: This audio may be disturbing to some of our listeners.
(Soundbite of 911 call)
Unidentified Woman: 911, where's your emergency?
Unidentified Man: Mrs. Giffords.
Unidentified Woman: Hello? Hello?
Unidentified Man: Oh, 911, there was a shooting at Safeway.
RAZ: Law enforcement officials say the shooter was 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner. Federal prosecutors filed charges against him today.
(Soundbite of 911 call)
Unidentified Woman: Was somebody shot then, sir?
Unidentified Man: Yes. The guy - it looks a guy had a semi-automatic pistol. He went in. He just started firing, and then he ran.
Unidentified Woman: Okay.
RAZ: Loughner will be in court for the first time tomorrow. The FBI says another man seen on video at the Safeway store and identified as a person of interest in the case has been cleared.
Our coverage begins this hour with NPR's Jeff Brady from Tucson.
JEFF BRADY: Doctors at University Medical Center are cautiously optimistic about Representative Gabrielle Giffords' prognosis. Dr. Peter Rhee is the trauma medical director there. He says she's being kept in a medically-induced coma. But the good news is Giffords is communicating.
Dr. PETER RHEE (Trauma Medical Director, University Medical Center): But when we lightened up the anesthetics and did our examination, we were very happy and optimistic because, eventually, over the course of the evening, she was able to follow simple commands.
BRADY: Rhee says he asked Giffords to show him two fingers, and she did. He says the congresswoman is not able to talk because she's on a ventilator and she can't see anything because her eyes are closed due to the nature of her injuries.
Doctors say the bullet traveled through the left side of her brain. That's the part that controls the right side of the body and speaking in most people.
Again, Dr. Rhee.
Dr. RHEE: Overall, this is about as good as it's going to get. You know, when you get shot in the head, and the bullet goes through your brain, the chances of you living is very small, and the chances of you waking up and actually following commands is even much smaller than that. So this so far has been a very good situation.
BRADY: Still, doctors say the next few days will be key in determining how Giffords' long-term recovery will go.
Dr. MICHAEL LEMOLE (Chief of Neurosurgery, University Medical Center): Brain swelling is really the biggest threat at this point.
BRADY: Dr. Michael Lemole is the chief of neurosurgery at University Medical Center.
Dr. LEMOLE: If we do run into trouble in the next few days, we do have further tools. We can use medical agents to dry out the brain. We can literally put a tube into the center of the brain, into one of the center fluid spaces, to measure pressure and then relieve that pressure if necessary. But because she looks good right now, there's no need for that.
BRADY: While her family waits for more news about Giffords, authorities are investigating the case. FBI Director Robert Mueller says agents and local authorities are working around the clock.
Mr. ROBERT MUELLER (Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation): This was an attack not only against dedicated public servants but against our fellow citizens, one being a child who was there to learn more about how our government works, other members of the community who were meeting with their elected officials for the first time or who were simply running errands on what otherwise would have been an ordinary weekend.
BRADY: The child Mueller referred to, Christina-Taylor Green, was 9 years old. Doctors say she was dead when she arrived at the hospital, and they were not able to revive her.
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik praised bystanders at the shopping center Saturday for preventing the gunman from doing even more harm, including a woman who has since been identified as Patricia Maisch.
Sheriff CLARENCE DUPNIK (Pima County, Arizona): When the gentleman ran out of the ammunition from his first magazine, he was attempting to change magazines, a woman went up and grabbed the magazine and tore it away from him.
BRADY: The sheriff's office says pause in shooting allowed two men to tackle the gunman, and with the help of a third man, they kept him subdued until officers arrived and took him into custody.
Jeff Brady, NPR News, Tucson.
GUY RAZ, host:
Reaction to the Arizona massacre is pouring in from around the country, especially from lawmakers and others close to Congresswoman Giffords.
Earlier today, the Speaker of the House John Boehner spoke about the tragedy.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Speaker of the House; Republican, Ohio): To the members of the House and their staffs, I ask that you, on this Sabbath day, that we keep Gabby and her staff in our thoughts and prayers. Public service is a high honor, but these tragic events remind us that all of us in our roles in service to our fellow citizens comes with a risk.
RAZ: Because of that risk, law enforcement officials held a conference call for all members of Congress today to talk about security in the days ahead.
NPR's Andrea Seabrook is in the U.S. Capitol following all of this.
And, Andrea, tell me what you know about this conference call.
ANDREA SEABROOK: Well, it was only open to members of Congress and their staffs, mainly because it included comments from the sergeant at arms, the chief of Capitol police, the head of the Office of the Attending Physician in the Capitol, and a few other people spoke.
They spoke about security of the members of Congress and their personnel. And, in fact, much of the call, apparently - and I get this from several congressional sources - spoke about concerns for security of spouses of members of Congress, how members keep safe, especially when they're in the districts.
All of these officials told members of Congress that they need to be coordinating with local police departments all across the United States in their districts.
I should say that Speaker Boehner in his comments said: An attack on one who serves is an attack on all who serve. And I think that is the major take-home message out of this conference call.
RAZ: Andrea, I can imagine that there's a sense of shock on Capitol Hill. What is it like up there today?
SEABROOK: Well, the most striking thing coming toward the building in the first place is that the flags are at half-staff. And we're all reminded that the flags are at half-staff because of the staffer of Congresswoman Giffords. Gabe Zimmerman died in the attack.
And, you know, oftentimes up here, the staffers, these people who work their hearts out for their member of Congress and truly believe in the cause that these people fight for, their names aren't often remembered.
And so for people up here in the Capitol, it's important to see the flags at half-staff for him.
RAZ: Andrea, I hope you don't mind, but I'd like to ask you to step out of your reporter's shoes for a moment and just talk about Gabrielle Giffords.
So many people seemed to love this person on both sides of the aisle, and you've come to know her pretty well yourself, haven't you?
SEABROOK: Yes. It's hard to imagine the anger being more misplaced. Gabrielle Giffords is a wonderful woman. Aside from her politics, we members of the press up here often work with these members of Congress and their staff so closely that we come to think of these people as colleagues.
And often, we care more - when the cameras are turned off and the lights are turned off, we care more about how a person is as a person than we do about their politics.
And you couldn't find somebody better to work with and more wonderful than Gabrielle Giffords. Her eyes shone. She would smile and hug me in the hall or hug her colleague in the call, and she is a joy to work with up here, and I think everyone feels the same way about her.
RAZ: That's NPR's congressional correspondent Andrea Seabrook.
Andrea, Thank you.
SEABROOK: Thanks.
GUY RAZ, host:
Another victim of the attack was a federal judge, John Roll. He was killed just as he was coming to greet Congresswoman Giffords.
Judge Roll was a widely respected jurist in Arizona. His friend and colleague, John Pelander, a justice on Arizona's Supreme Court, joins me now from Tucson.
And, Justice Pelander, thank you for being with us at such a difficult time.
Mr. JOHN PELANDER (Chief Judge, Arizona Supreme Court): You're welcome.
RAZ: I know Judge Roll was a friend of yours. Can you tell me what he was like, not the professional John Roll, but the person?
Mr. PELANDER: He was extremely kind, compassionate. He cared about other people beyond the law. He obviously was a great judge and a, you know, a great legal mind and so forth. But he did not have any aloofness to him at all. He did not have what some judges might call black robitis, that they feel that they have an elevated status. He was just very, very personable and friendly to everyone and truly cared about other people.
RAZ: I understand that he was stopping by yesterday to thank Gabby Giffords for some help that she gave him. What do you know about that?
Mr. PELANDER: I really don't. That's - all I know about that is what I've heard on the reports. I had heard that he had gone to mass on Saturday morning, which apparently was his custom, and he was on his way home and stopped by the grocery store, apparently picked up a few items.
I don't know if he already knew that Gabby would be there. Apparently, he might have known that. I do know that Gabby had helped in obtaining some funding for a federal court facility in Yuma, Arizona. And perhaps - this is speculation, but perhaps John had - was just simply going to stop by and say hi and thanks to her.
RAZ: Justice Pelander, when was the last time you saw him?
Mr. PELANDER: Boy, it's probably been several weeks. I saw him, believe it or not, fairly frequently at the YMCA in Tucson. He would come in in the mornings to swim. And when I'm in Tucson, I try to get there in the mornings. We would run into each other in the locker room. So that was our most frequent meeting in the last few months. And it's probably been several weeks since I last saw him.
RAZ: Judge Roll is someone who was threatened in the past for some of his rulings. Can you describe the type of jurist he was?
Mr. PELANDER: He had a very sharp mind, great intellect and great legal ability. His demeanor on the bench was excellent, which fit right in with his general personality.
I would describe him as a judge's judge. He was very well-respected not only by his colleagues on the federal bench but also by the entire Arizona state judiciary, and he was very much respected by the bar, just a tremendous asset to the community. It's a great loss to not only the legal community and the bench but also the entire state.
RAZ: That's Justice John Pelander. He's a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court and a friend of Judge John Roll, who was killed in that attack in Tucson yesterday.
Justice Pelander, thank you.
Mr. PELANDER: Thank you very much.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Southern Sudanese flocked to the polls today in a vote almost certain to split Africa's largest country in two, north and south, after 20 years of fighting that's left millions dead.
In a moment, we'll have a report from the north, but first to the south, where NPR's Frank Langfitt met one voter who survived that country's brutal civil war.
FRANK LANGFITT: Batali Charles lined up at 6 a.m., two hours before the polls opened in Lanya, a market town amid Southern Sudan's vast expanse of brush and rocky mountains. He wore a pair of jeans, sandals and a smile.
Mr. BATALI CHARLES: I'm much excited about the referendum.
LANGFITT: Charles and most Southern Sudanese voters were very excited. Today was one they'd dreamed of for years. After more than two decades of civil war, Southern Sudan will spend the next week deciding whether to become independent from the north.
For most people here, it's an easy decision. The Muslim north and its Arab militias bombed and burned the largely Christian and animist south in what became Africa's longest civil war. Two million people died.
Batali was just a boy when the north attacked Lanya. Like so many southerners, he and his family fled into the harsh countryside.
Mr. CHARLES: During the war, you cannot stay in a place like this. You have to run and keep yourself somewhere in the bush.
LANGFITT: How long did you live in the bush?
Mr. CHARLES: I lived in the bush for around 20 years.
LANGFITT: Twenty years?
Mr. CHARLES: Yeah, 20 years in the bush.
LANGFITT: It's not an unusual story in Southern Sudan. Batali Charles is now 27 and has two children. Charles says independence will give them a better life. Like most Southern Sudanese, he says the north starved the south of resources, neglecting schools, health care and roads.
Mr. CHARLES: What I wanted them to get in Southern Sudan in the future, they should really enjoy life, a life of freedom.
LANGFITT: There have been concerns that violence instigated by the north could mar the referendum. But today's polling appeared to be peaceful. Because of Southern Sudan's size and poor roads, polls will remain open into next weekend.
Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Juba, Southern Sudan.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: And I am Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson in Khartoum. Here in the Sudanese capital, voter turnout appeared low on the first day of the historic referendum.
At the polling station in Kober, a neighborhood where Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir once lived, fewer than 10 percent of the registered voters turned up by the afternoon. There were also nearly three times as many election monitors than there were poll workers. They eagerly tended to any voter who wandered into the tent.
Poll worker Mohammed Musa al Hassan pored over the rolls to tally who cast ballots since opening time.
Mr. MOHAMMED MUSA AL HASSAN: About 33.
NELSON: Thirty-three?
Mr. HASSAN: Until now, yes.
NELSON: That's from 8 o'clock this morning?
Mr. HASSAN: Yes, this morning. It start this morning at 8 o'clock, and we expect more.
NELSON: He blamed the low turnout on cold weather. Actually, it was 77 degrees, and the skies were clear. But even without weather issues, the depressed turnout was no surprise. That's because most people in the north reject the idea of a divided Sudan. They worry most about economic hardship, given they would lose most of their oil fields to a new nation.
Many of those who favor dividing Sudan, like the impoverished southerners who live in Khartoum's slums, chose to forgo voting for fear of a backlash from the police or state security agents.
Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: At this polling center representing 50 blocks in a slum called Jabarona, only one voter was present: a 47-year-old widow named Mary Kauya.
A low northern turnout isn't likely to worry southern officials. They've registered more than enough voters in the south to achieve the results needed for their new country to be born.
They also don't want southern voters who live in the north to do what Suleiman Kom Suleiman did. He cast his ballot for a continued unified Sudan.
Mr. SULEIMAN KOM SULEIMAN: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: The 38-year-old carpenter explains his family life and work are here in Khartoum. He adds his homeland lacks adequate services and infrastructure to be an independent country.
The Carter Center's observation mission says it's too early to say whether voters in the north were intimidated or otherwise prevented from getting to the polls. But one center official says what the monitors saw in Khartoum on the first day of the referendum was generally positive.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Khartoum.
GUY RAZ, host:
Four hundred years ago, English-speaking Christians were handed the King James Bible. Today, it's the bestselling book of all time. But it turns out a lot of it was copied from a translation finished 50 years before, in the late 16th century by a man named William Tyndale.
And according to Reverend Paul Cross, who teaches at the Master's Institute in St. Paul, those translations created a stir.
The Reverend PAUL CROSS (Master's Institute, St. Paul): On the one hand, you had people in England who were very hungry to have the Bible in their own native tongue. They were very excited about this. But translating the Bible into English was against the law in England. But there was a certain faction within the English people who really desired this.
The church and the political powers within England at the time saw this as a threat, and they were certainly opposed to this. And as a matter of fact, they had mass burnings of Tyndale's Bible at a place called Paul's Cross or St. Paul's Cross in London.
RAZ: The burning of his translations foreshadows what eventually would happen to him. He was arrested. He was tried for heresy, put in prison and eventually burned at the stake.
The Rev. CROSS: That's right. Ultimately, he was executed by first strangling and then by being burned at the stake.
RAZ: Reverend Paul Cross, when I was reading through some of the background on him, I was amazed to learn about some of the phrases that we use...
The Rev. CROSS: Yes.
RAZ: ...some of the common, popular phrases that we use that he basically invented. What are some of them?
The Rev. CROSS: One that people say the twinkling of an eye. That's a famous phrase. But my brother's keeper, that's certainly gotten into...
RAZ: That's Tyndale.
The Rev. CROSS: ...the common - Tyndale said that, yes. Filthy lucre is another favorite of mine; scapegoat, gave up the ghost, sign of the times...
RAZ: Wow.
The Rev. CROSS: ...fight the good fight.
RAZ: So even Prince owes something to William Tyndale?
The Rev. CROSS: Evidently.
(Soundbite of laughter)
The Rev. CROSS: But, you know, one surprising thing is that even Jewish speakers of English have gained a new name for their most sacred holiday, Passover. That was an invention of William Tyndale. Most people don't realize that.
RAZ: He was not canonized or remembered in a way that other martyrs were. Why not? Why, I mean, why did he sort of fade into obscurity?
The Rev. CROSS: Fading into obscurity, he had the distinct misfortune of being a theological giant in a time when historical titans sort of walked the land.
RAZ: Right.
The Rev. CROSS: But the real problem that Tyndale had was, is that he seemed to alienate just about everyone. He certainly alienated the Catholic Church. So he's not going to find any friends there.
He particularly alienated Henry VIII, who could have been his closest supporter had he not been so self-avowedly in favor of many of Luther's reforms, which were seen by Henry and many other monarchs of the day as direct threats to monarchy.
RAZ: Next year, as part of, I guess, the marking of the 400 years since the King James version came out, two new versions of the English Bible are set to be released. One is the New International Version. The other is the Common English Bible. How much of a departure do we expect these versions to be? Will they be earth-shattering, or will they be fairly conservative revisions?
The Rev. CROSS: The New International Version will likely be a fairly conservative revision of the already-existing New International Version. The CEB is a totally new translation done by a broad team of scholars.
And that, even though materially, they'll be different from Tyndale, they'll be pretty formally the same in the sense that Tyndale did use what was the best that he had at the time, and Tyndale did try to understand that translation was a matter of putting it in a language of people that people could understand.
Again, that was his mission, and that's really what he accomplished.
RAZ: That's Reverend Paul Cross. He's talking about the translation of the Bible into English on the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible.
Paul Cross, thank you.
The Rev. CROSS: Thank you.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
GUY RAZ, host:
The clock is now ticking on our Three-Minute Fiction contest here on weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Round Six is now open.
Ms. CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: I want you to write a story in which one character tells a joke, and one character cries.
RAZ: That's our judge this round, novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, with her new challenge. To see the full rules and submit your story, go to our website npr.org/threeminutefiction. And Three Minute Fiction is all spelled out, no spaces. And good luck.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
(Soundbite of song, "Crystal Frontier")
CALEXICO (Music Group): (Singing) Marco's shadow falls on the door to the seven lost cities of gold.
GUY RAZ, host:
This song is called "Crystal Frontier." It's by the band Calexico. And in 2008, Gabrielle Giffords chose this song as the wake-up call for the astronauts on the Space Shuttle Discovery. Her husband, Mark Kelly, was the shuttle commander on that flight.
And Gabrielle Giffords picked this song because she happens to be a huge fan of Calexico and also a friend of the lead singer, Joey Burns, who's with me now from Tucson.
Joey, thanks for being with us at such a difficult time.
Mr. JOEY BURNS (Musician): You're welcome. Thanks for calling.
RAZ: We are all, of course, pulling for her, Joey. We've been hearing so much about Gabrielle Giffords, the kind of person she was. How did you first react when you found out that this member of Congress was a big fan of your band?
Mr. BURNS: I was a little surprised, I've got to be honest. But as soon as I got to meet her, I could see why. I mean, she's very active in the community. She's always going to shows. She's just that kind of person, you know, that is very passionate.
RAZ: And you've gotten to know her over the years since you first met her in 2006, I understand.
Mr. BURNS: That's right.
RAZ: And what is she like?
Mr. BURNS: She's incredibly down to Earth, especially for one who's in such an important position. I mean, I'm just always kind of impressed on how she's able to focus on each and every individual that she's talking with. She's never distracted. She's always right there.
RAZ: I understand you went to a few vigils last night for Gabby Giffords. Can you tell me about them?
Mr. BURNS: My wife and I, we walked to several of these more somber events, and one was at the historic Rialto Theater downtown. The theater canceled its prior event and just kind of opened the door to the people. It's kind of like the downtown version of our kind of nondenominational church. It just kind of is home to everyone.
And so, a lot of musicians came up, performed. Some people got up and spoke. People lit candles. It was a very touching and moving occasion.
RAZ: I know this must be such a painful time for you, and as I say, we are all pulling for her. Joey Burns is the lead singer of the band Calexico, and he joined me from member station KUAZ in Tucson.
Joey, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.
Mr. BURNS: You're welcome, Guy. Thanks so much.
(Soundbite of song, "Crystal Frontier")
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. You can hear the best of this program on a new podcast, Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Subscribe or listen at npr.org/weekendatc. We're back on the radio next weekend. Until then, thanks for listening, and have a great week.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Tom Cole reports.
TOM COLE: The place where all of these recordings will wind up sits on a hill in Culpepper, Virginia. Gene DeAnna, head of the Recorded Sound Section of the Library of Congress, leads the way into one of the many rooms where recordings land before they get into the library's vaults.
GENE DEANNA: And this is where we first receive collections and do the first initial counts.
COLE: It's a room lined with shelves. An eight by 10 sheet of paper marked simply Universal Collection hangs over a set of shelves.
DEANNA: So here's a Louis Armstrong "Ain't Misbehavin'" mother. And when I say mother, I mean metal recording. It actually has the negative. It's actually a negative, press it into wax and you get the grooves.
COLE: The Library is waiting for special styli that can track these metal masters that were used to press the commercial 78 RPM release of Louis Armstrong's recording.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC, "AIN'T MISBEHAVIN'")
COLE: So far, the library has received about 50,000 metal masters, a tractor- trailer load a week, about 20 to 25 pallets of metal discs, since November.
DEANNA: The majority of the collection are the metal masters, about 200,000. Then there are going to be another 8,000 to 10,000 tape reels and probably twice that, maybe 15,000 lacquer discs.
COLE: The negotiations and legal agreements took about two years to complete. Universal had been storing the discs and tapes at a commercial facility near Boyers, Pennsylvania.
DEANNA: They've been investing in a half-a-century of storage for some of this material, and it hasn't been touched since it was first issued.
COLE: Most of it is not worth Universal's time and money to even consider releasing to the general public.
DEANNA: Ninety percent of what we're taking in here are not commercially viable materials for them. That is, to go through the tremendous effort and time to re-master these materials to sell to a very, very small market, it would be probably a losing cause.
COLE: Universal has already issued what'll sell. In fact, only about 14 percent of the music that was released before 1960 is commercially available today.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "WHITE CHRISTMAS")
BING CROSBY: (Singing) I'm dreaming of a white Christmas...
COLE: The Library got the masters for Bing Crosby's 1947 recording of "White Christmas," the second time Crosby recorded the song.
ROBERT BAMBERGER: The reason why Bing had to re-record it in 1947 is that the song sold so well that Decca was no longer able to strike copies from the 1942 master.
COLE: He says Universal made the right decision to donate its masters to the library.
BAMBERGER: The best interests of preserving recorded sound heritage is by relinquishing these master recordings and placing them were we can all exhale because we know that industry models come and go, corporations come and go, but we hope the Library of Congress will be forever.
COLE: For his part, the library's Gene DeAnna is most excited about what he doesn't know he's got.
DEANNA: There's so much possibility here of discovery of recordings that really have just been off the sonic landscape of America for so long, and important recordings, familiar sounds but long gone. It's just going to be a treasure to mine for many years for the archive.
COLE: Tom Cole, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
CD: And that describes Dinnerstein's view of Bach's music, music that is full of beautiful strangeness, not just precise, orderly and mathematical.
SIMONE DINNERSTEIN: And it's when he takes a different route harmonically, or he changes which voice is dominant, that the music gets slightly misshapen, and that makes it have just a depth that it does.
SIEGEL: I'd like to play the first track on "A Strange Beauty," which is Bach's - my German is terrible, but it's "Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ," "I Call to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ." And I'd like you to tell me what's going on.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST")
DINNERSTEIN: I mean, to start with, this is a piece that began in a cantata.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST")
DINNERSTEIN: Bach wrote an improvisation on it from the cantata for organ, and then Busoni, the pianist from the early 20th century, decided to transcribe it for piano. And when I played this piece, I was thinking very much about the sound of an organ in a cathedral.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST")
DINNERSTEIN: The voicing is changing all the time. Sometimes you hear the melody as being the dominant part, but then an inner voice within a chord takes precedence, or then a bass note takes precedence, and it's always shifting.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST")
DINNERSTEIN: Like there, you just heard a note in the left hand, in the bass, that created a dissonance, which was really important.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST")
DINNERSTEIN: And then here we're taking a route to another harmony that is so unusual. I mean, it shifts to a different region here.
(SOUNDBITE OF HUMMING)
SIEGEL: It's beautiful and, as you describe it, a very intricate piece of music.
DINNERSTEIN: It is. On the one hand, you look at the music, and you think it's very, very simple, but playing it is very complicated.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ICH RUF ZU DIR, HERR JESU CHRIST")
SIEGEL: So we're hearing Bach, we're hearing Busoni, the 20th-century take on this Baroque composition, and then we're hearing Dinnerstein here in the 21st century. That's you.
DINNERSTEIN: Yeah.
SIEGEL: I've heard you say that you have a sound that you think of as you play the piano. What is that sound?
DINNERSTEIN: I like a sound that doesn't have attack in it, that is not about the hammers hitting the strings or the force of my arms and my fingers hitting the keys. And even when I'm making a big sound, I want it to expand, to fill the space.
SIEGEL: The net result of all of this, for me at least, in listening to "A Strange Beauty," is hearing a Bach that is more expressive, at moments, sounds like Bach verging on Chopin, a very different way of playing Bach that I'm accustomed to hearing.
DINNERSTEIN: I guess we tend to categorize composers into periods of time and style, but I wouldn't say that I think of Bach's music as being romantic, but it's very expressive, and it's very soulful.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "D-MINOR CONCERTO FOR KEYBOARD AND STRINGS")
DINNERSTEIN: This is the first movement of the "D-Minor Concerto for Keyboard and Strings." I've always felt about this piece that it can sound like it's on like a click track.
SIEGEL: On a click track?
DINNERSTEIN: Yeah, like there's a beat that is a constant beat that's always going, you know, like when you record for movies, they put on a click track that keeps the beat. And I don't feel that music at all like this. Especially this movement, I think does not stay at one tempo.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "D-MINOR CONCERTO FOR KEYBOARD AND STRINGS")
DINNERSTEIN: And this is something that orchestras are just really not used to thinking about Bach like this, and I felt that we really successfully captured the thing I had in my head. It's very much a dialogue between the keyboard and the orchestra, and that, too, I felt, came through in the recording.
SIEGEL: A lot of the ways in which you speak about Bach and his keyboard music sounds like you could be talking about a jazz composer or a jazz pianist. There's a hint here of the jazz vocabulary.
DINNERSTEIN: And as a classical musician, I was brought up to have the utmost respect for tradition and for being really observant. And I think though those things are important, I think getting away from that is important, too.
SIEGEL: So if somebody says, but is this what Bach had in mind when he wrote this music, I guess your first question is, well, maybe the notation doesn't tell us exactly what he had in mind when he was playing it, but you're also open to expanding a bit on what he had in mind.
DINNERSTEIN: And I'm not playing the music because I wanted to faithfully re-create what Bach thought. I'm playing the music because there are elements in that music that speak to me now in the present day, having heard all of the other music that I've heard.
SIEGEL: Yeah, you're here now. You're living in your own times.
DINNERSTEIN: I am, and I think the fact that I've heard pop music and jazz and rock and folk and also romantic interpretations of Baroque music means that I have a wealth of ideas and sounds that just simply didn't exist in Bach's time.
SIEGEL: Simone Dinnerstein, thank you very much for talking with us.
DINNERSTEIN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Simone Dinnerstein's new album is called "Bach: A Strange Beauty."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: Simone Dinnerstein's new CD is called "Bach: A Strange Beauty." You can hear it in its entirety on our website, nprmusic.org. This is NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Howie Movshovitz of Colorado Public Radio reports.
HOWIE MOVSHOVITZ: Lanzmann says "Shoah" is not a history lesson.
NORRIS: It is not to give information that you could find in any kind of history book. The most important is the faces of the people. No one history book may give you the emotions, the strengths of human face, when the people are paying the highest price in order to revive what they went through.
MOVSHOVITZ: The faces of the witnesses belong to villagers who lived near the death camps, former Nazis, and survivors like Rudolph Vrba, who escaped from Auschwitz.
NORRIS: Constantly people from the heart of Europe are disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place. With the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. But I knew, of course, that within a couple of hours after they arrive there, 90 percent of them will be gassed or something like that. I knew that. And somehow in my thinking, it was difficult for me to comprehend that people can disappear in this way.
MOVSHOVITZ: One of the achievements of "Shoah," says film critic Jim Hoberman, is to take the Holocaust out of the past and into a permanent present tense.
NORRIS: You're watching people in the present recollect what happened to them or what they saw or what they did in the past. So the history is with us. He's making it as present as he possibly can.
MOVSHOVITZ: But as the senior film critic for the Village Voice says, transmitting those experiences to the audience is complicated.
SIEGEL: the interviewee, the filmmaker and an interpreter who translates between the Frenchman and his subjects, who speak many European languages.
NORRIS: The movie is very scrupulous in attempting to determine what is truth or what is authentic. And part of this authenticity means understanding that people's words, and also their memories, are filtered in the course of the movie. They're precipitated by his questions and then they're filtered through the interpreter.
MOVSHOVITZ: Because filmmaker Claude Lanzmann believes that the truth lies in the details, he pushes his subjects aggressively, though that's not a term he appreciates. Lanzmann points to the long, difficult scenes with survivor Abraham Bomba.
NORRIS: I have asked you and you didn't answer: What was your impression the first time you saw arriving these naked women with children? What did you feel?
NORRIS: I tell you something. To have a feeling over that was very hard to feel anything or to have a feeling.
NORRIS: You have to.
NORRIS: I won't be able to do it.
NORRIS: You have to do it. I know it's very hard.
MOVSHOVITZ: It's one of the most powerful devices the filmmaker uses, says Irina Leimbacher, who teaches film at Keene State College in New Hampshire.
NORRIS: What they're expressing isn't verbal, and it's not verbalizable, and I think that's very clear throughout Lanzmann's film that so much is not verbalizable, but we can engage with it in a much, much deeper way than if we were just watching a series of talking heads.
MOVSHOVITZ: But it's not an easy film to watch, says Jim Hoberman.
NORRIS: And I didn't have an answer for that because I don't know whether people should see it. I mean, certainly, you can't see it and be unaffected by it. And so it's - in a way, it's something to be approached with a certain amount of trepidation.
MOVSHOVITZ: At the age of 85, Claude Lanzmann remains uncompromising about his film and its subjects, the witnesses who struggled to tell their unspeakable stories.
NORRIS: They were, with the Nazis, the only witnesses of the death of the Jewish people. They never say I. They said we. They are the spokesmen of the dead. This is the core of "Shoah."
MOVSHOVITZ: For NPR News, I'm Howie Movshovitz.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF BULLDOZERS)
LOURDES GARCIA: Unidentified Man #1: Demolition is very beautiful for somebody who is fascist as you are.
GARCIA: Said Husayni's family claims ownership of the property. His family fought for years to retain the hotel.
SAID HUSAYNI: It is very painful to see this happening. They want to destroy the Arab presence in Jerusalem. They want to end it.
GARCIA: Elisha Peleg is a member of the Jerusalem City Council. He was at the Shepherd Hotel yesterday when the demolition was taking place.
ELISHA PELEG: I don't think that the United States or any other country has the right to interfere in the interior issues in Jerusalem, and now is the time to build Jewish neighborhoods in this area because we have the right to build and to live in any part of Jerusalem.
GARCIA: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Jerusalem.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA: The day began on Capitol Hill today with Capitol police rushing to close off an area, due to the appearance of a suspicious package. It turned out to be nothing, as is usually the case. But it was a reminder of the daunting task of trying to protect Congress, especially since 1998 when two policemen were shot dead in the Capitol. After 9/11, envelopes filled with deadly anthrax spores should up at senators' offices.
NORRIS: 00 this morning, hundreds of staffers and a few lawmakers gathered on the Capitol steps for a moment of silence. It ended with a prayer by a preacher, Missouri House Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.
SIEGEL: Bless these, God, your servants who serve this nation. Keep them safe.
WELNA: One of those servants was Michigan House Republican Fred Upton. He said everyone was struck by what he called this awful event Saturday. But he did not want the shooting of Representative Giffords to result in new security restrictions for such public events.
SIEGEL: Most of us would balk at additional security things, knowing that that would - that's not who we are. I mean, we come from the communities that we represent, we're the same people that we were before.
WELNA: But lawmakers do get threats and many are real. And Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Terrance Gainer says they've been increasing.
NORRIS: On the Senate side, we average about five a week. Last year, I think we had 49 very credible threats. The year before that it was 29. But we've worked with the locals, and especially the FBI, the U.S. attorney and the local prosecutors. Some of those have been prosecuted. Most of those actually have been referred to mental care facilities, and that's generally the gist of the type of thing we see.
WELNA: Pennsylvania House Democrat Allyson Schwartz says she received a very real threat last year.
SIEGEL: It was a phone call, and he said he's going to come and kill us and he had guns and he was going do it. So we took that seriously. The police took that very seriously. And he did have a gun and he did acknowledge making that threat.
WELNA: Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia was holding two meetings today with his constituents.
SIEGEL: My job is to be accessible to the folks who hired me, in a way that allows them to express their views.
WELNA: Speaking from his district, Minnesota House Democratic Tim Walz says he has asked local police to be on hand when he's held large events with his constituents.
SIEGEL: I've got to tell you, if I'm doing a store appearance - which I've done dozens of them, just like Gabrielle did on Saturday - having a police officer stand right next to me, I think that can have a chilling effect on the positive rhetoric that has to happen.
WELNA: But some lawmakers say overheated rhetoric is itself a security threat. Here's Georgia House Democrat Hank Johnson.
SIEGEL: That kind of angry rhetoric can lead to angry words. It can lead to angry acts. It can lead to acts of violence.
WELNA: David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
But as NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, the risky period can go on for a week or more for someone with an injury like Giffords'.
JON HAMILTON: Most people who get shot in the head die before they reach the hospital. For the ones who do make it, there is a great risk that their brain will swell up so much that critical areas are damaged. But at a press conference in Tucson today, Michael Lemole, the chief of neurosurgery at University Medical Center, said so far, swelling hasn't been a problem for Giffords.
MICHAEL LEMOLE: That swelling can sometimes take three days or five days to maximize. But every day that goes by and we don't see an increase, we're slightly more optimistic.
HAMILTON: Bryan Oh is a surgeon at Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center in Houston, the home of one of the busiest trauma centers in the country. He spoke from a phone in one of the hospital's operating rooms.
BRYAN OH: She still got shot in the head with a high energy missile. She still very well could die. You know, I would say over the next few days is where the rubber hits the road.
HAMILTON: But Oh says it's still too soon to know whether that will protect her brain completely from the swelling.
OH: The peak swelling date could be around, you know, post-update three or four, which we're like getting into right now. It can go on even for a week or 10 days afterwards. It depends on how bad her injury was.
HAMILTON: On the other hand, Oh says he's treated patients with similar injuries who have made remarkable recoveries.
OH: I've dealt with one recently, a similar case, and the guy ended up - of course, it was on the right side of his brain - but almost the exact same trajectory that I'm guessing that she had. And after about two and a half, three weeks, he was talking and interactive.
HAMILTON: Keith Black is chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
KEITH BLACK: The bullet only went to one side of the brain, so it didn't go to both sides. It didn't cross the midline where you have all of the deep critical, you know, thalamic and brainstem structures that are very important for consciousness.
HAMILTON: Black says a high trajectory means a smaller chance that a person shot in the left side of the brain, which is usually important to language, will lose the ability to communicate.
BLACK: Because the language areas are lower down. So if the bullet is higher, it's going to be away from her language areas.
HAMILTON: Black says the trajectory that's good for language can be bad for walking, though.
BLACK: The motor areas that control the leg can be in that region. So, you know, we would want to hope that it's also avoided those leg areas.
HAMILTON: Black says tests of higher mental functions are hard to do until a patient can talk, which they can't do as long they are heavily sedated and breathing through a respirator.
BLACK: The next big step for her is going to be getting off the respirator. You know, when they wake her up and if she can support, you know, her respirations and you don't get into any problems with the oxygen level and the blood dropping, or the carbon dioxide going up too high that can cause more brain swelling, that would be very good.
HAMILTON: Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
It's by Debbie Friedman who died yesterday at age 59. This is a recording of Debbie Friedman, whose melodies have re-shaped the sound of Jewish worship in Reform, Conservative and Re-constructionist synagogues.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MI SHEBERACH")
DEBBIE FRIEDMAN: (Singing foreign language). May the source of strength who bless the ones before us help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing, and let us say amen.
SIEGEL: I interviewed Debbie Friedman on this program back in 1997, a few days before one of her Carnegie Hall concerts. I asked her about this prayer for healing that would have sounded so out of place in a Reform temple, say, 50 years ago.
FRIEDMAN: And I think that the greatest breakthrough that has happened in these past maybe 20, 25 years, is that those walls are crumbling, that people have found now that we need to be integrated human beings that both know and think and also feel.
SIEGEL: And for a generation of American Jews, the music that evoked feeling was often the music of Debbie Friedman. She died in Orange County, California, of complications from pneumonia.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Travelling in the Middle East, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the vote.
HILLARY CLINTON: Among those voting this week are Sudan's so-called Lost Boys, men who were orphaned or separated from their families as children during the country's brutal civil war. NPR's Frank Langfitt caught up with one Lost Boy, whose life became a best-selling novel in America and who has returned to his homeland to build a school.
FRANK LANGFITT: After a peace agreement between north and south, Deng returned to Juba in 2006. He says when he got here the place was still a wreck.
VALENTINO ACHAK DENG: On some of this street, you can see destroyed war tanks. On some of these roads or some of this neighborhood, you could see the bones and skulls of dead people.
LANGFITT: Today, as Southern Sudan appears headed for independence, Deng is optimistic, and Juba looks a lot better. Paved roads arrived for the first time in 2007. Deng and a friend are now taking me past hotels and restaurants.
ACHAK DENG: Juba is a booming city.
LANGFITT: And one of incredible contrast. Next to barefoot women selling piles of gravel by the side of the road - so we're passing, right now we're passing - is that a Toyota dealership?
ACHAK DENG: Yes. Just imagine, we have a Toyota dealership.
LANGFITT: Deng grew up in a small village called Marial Bai. In the 1980s, northern bombers and Arab militias came.
ACHAK DENG: They bombed Marial Bai, destroyed it, killed everything, burned, took crops and livestock.
LANGFITT: Were you there when they came?
ACHAK DENG: I was there. I ran away with the rest.
LANGFITT: How old were you?
ACHAK DENG: I was nine years old.
LANGFITT: In 2007, he returned to start a high school in Marial Bai, where there was none.
ACHAK DENG: We have 250 students. Our annual budget for now stands at about 200,000 because the school is free.
LANGFITT: The school is funded by Deng's private foundation. He says most donations come from Americans touched by his story. Deng is now 32 years old. He says, for a Sudanese child of war, his life's journey is almost inconceivable.
ACHAK DENG: I never imagined that I would be any person I am right now.
LANGFITT: Frank Langfitt, NPR News, Juba, Southern Sudan.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
It's now time for All Tech Considered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: And to tell us what that $16 million is for, here's the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, who joins us from London. Welcome to the program.
JIMMY WALES: Thank you. It's good to be here.
SIEGEL: And, first, what are you going to use the $16 million for?
WALES: But this year we're actually engaging in some new projects. We're going to open our first office outside the U.S. in India to help further the growth of Wikipedia in the Indian languages.
SIEGEL: The operation that you're running seems so huge, the number of entries that are out there and the number of people using it just feels like $16 million seems like an awfully slim sum. I mean, it's obviously a lot of money. It sounds rather little. You're actually - what is the actual budget of the operation?
WALES: Well, our annual budget for the coming year is $20.1 million. So we raised $16 million in the annual campaign. We have money that comes in throughout the year from small donors. We have some grants, some major donors. It is a small amount of money. I mean, it's really astounding what we've been able to do with such a small amount of money but in part it's because of our nature as an online organization, as a really community-driven organization where all of the things that you see on the website are really in the hands of the volunteers and all of their social structures and things like that. And the foundation's job is primarily to keep the site on the air.
SIEGEL: If one could calculate the ratio of users of any outlet or publication in any medium, including the Web, to the number of employees or budgeted dollars at that outlet, Wikipedia would have to have the highest ratio on earth. What would it be?
WALES: As far as I'm aware, yes.
SIEGEL: What do you think it would be?
WALES: Well, we have around 50 employees right now. We're going to hire a few more this year. And we have about 400 million visitors to the website every month. So, you know, each of the employees is responsible for about eight million people. That's pretty amazing if you think about it.
SIEGEL: As we were getting it wrong, you were getting it wrong, Wikipedia was getting it wrong along, too. I could tell you who got it wrong here, but at Wikipedia, a contributor identified only as 138.47.108.25 got it wrong. Why does anyone can edit mean anyone can edit anonymously?
WALES: Well, I mean, in a case like this, of course I don't think it shows a weakness in Wikipedia. I think we ran with the story for the same reason that lots of people did. And it was actually very interesting to look at the discussion and debate that emerged afterwards detailing specifically, well, how should we handle this? What should we tell people, and when and so forth? So it's quite an interesting community.
SIEGEL: But in this community, for example, I read about one of the contributors who took part in the Wiki edit of the Gabrielle Giffords entry, he's C.Fred. I know where he went to college, what he does for a living, that he's interested in the interstate highway system and the difference between Canadian football and U.S. football, but not his name. He doesn't sign with a name and take responsibility for his contribution. Why not?
WALES: Now, if we did a look at everything and we saw that, gee, when people supply their real name, they do a really great job and if they don't supply a real name they do a really lousy job, obviously we would change things. But it doesn't seem to actually matter.
SIEGEL: How many people are there who are contributing and editing items on Wikipedia?
WALES: Well, it's hard to really come up with a single number because some people are extremely active. They're on the website every day. This is the core community. Of those there's a few thousand. Then there's a broader group of people who are semi-regular editors and, you know, contribute from time to time. And we would say there's probably around 100,000 of those. And then there's a lot more people who just may make one or two edits every now and then. They see a little something wrong and they just chip in and help out.
SIEGEL: Is there a profile of a contributor to Wikipedia that would pretty much describe the typical contributor or no such thing?
WALES: Yeah, we've done some user surveys to find out who's contributing to Wikipedia. The average age is around 26. We're about 85 percent male, which is something we'd like to change in the future.
SIEGEL: Eighty-five percent male?
WALES: Eighty-five percent male. We think that's because of our tech-geek roots and I think it reflects a broader issue in society in many ways. But we're hoping as we change the software to make it more accessible for more people to edit that you shouldn't need to be a computer geek. We want to be welcoming to geeks who aren't computer geeks.
SIEGEL: How would you describe your ambitions for the second 10 years of Wikipedia's existence?
WALES: And what we're really looking at is, where are the places that we see a lot of activity that can be really supported and extended so that we can really fulfill the dream of Wikipedia, which is a free encyclopedia for every single person on the planet in their own language.
SIEGEL: Do you - are you all involved in apps and in access on mobile phones and the like and thinking that that's where the action is going to be for Wikipedia or like those of us who hang out in radio still, are you committed to the old-fashioned Web?
WALES: On the other hand, I haven't decided yet if I'm just old-fashioned and wrong or if I'm right, but someone asked me recently, did you see Wired magazine's big story about the Web being dead? I said, yeah, I did see it, I read it on the Web.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
WALES: So, we'll see.
SIEGEL: Well, Jimmy Wales, good luck in the future at Wikipedia. And thanks for talking with us today.
WALES: All right, thanks.
SIEGEL: So, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, the site turns 10 years old on January 15th.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
A brief pause for reflection today as the country joined President Obama, lawmakers and investigators in a moment of silence. It was meant to honor those killed and wounded in Tucson on Saturday. But when the bowed heads were lifted, the investigation, the grief, the vigils and a heated political debate resumed.
SIEGEL: The alleged gunman, 22-year-old Jared Loughner is in court for the first time today. He's being arraigned in Phoenix. In Tucson, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords remains in critical condition. Dr. Michael Lemole says he's watching closely to make sure Giffords' brain doesn't swell, which could cause more problems.
D: We're not out of the woods yet. That swelling can sometimes take three days or five days to maximize. But every day that goes by and we don't see an increase, we're slightly more optimistic.
NORRIS: As Giffords remains in the hospital, a political discussion about the attack is intensifying. And as NPR's Jeff Brady reports, talk radio is at the forefront.
JEFF BRADY: On his national radio program, Rush Limbaugh was his defiant self, speaking directly to other talk show hosts.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW")
NORRIS: Hold your heads high and turn this back on the media and the Democrats who are co-conspirators in policies that are bankrupting this country and risking the future for our children and grandchildren.
BRADY: Limbaugh said Democrats were trying to use the Arizona shooting for political advantage. That was a message heard over and over on Tucson's station KNST's morning show, too.
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE MORNING RITUAL")
U: The Morning Ritual with Garret Lewis.
BRADY: Host Garret Lewis took call after call critical of Sheriff Dupnik's comments. Here is someone identified as Dominic(ph).
(SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "THE MORNING RITUAL")
DOMINIC: This is as dumb as saying, oh, you played a video game, the video game made him do this. No, he did this.
NORRIS: You're right. And - allegedly, of course. And that's what you and I, Dominic, are so upset and so are many other people that are listening, that our sheriff would actually throw out that other thing and lay blame on everyone but this alleged shooter.
BRADY: Well, talk radio was furious with Sheriff Dupnik. It was pretty easy to find people on the streets of Tucson who agree with him.
NORRIS: I watched the last election and I saw the billboards and Gabrielle Giffords had some really rotten things said about her.
BRADY: Beverly Brown voted for Giffords in the November election.
NORRIS: I think you have to be careful what you say. I think everybody has to be responsible for what they say. I think you have to think of what you're saying when you say it, who you're saying it to.
BRADY: Jeff Brady, NPR News, Tucson.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
In the Arizona legislature today, the tone was more subdued. The legislature convened with an invocation delivered by Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of the Phoenix Catholic Diocese.
NORRIS: O loving God, creator and father of us all, we come before you with hearts weighed down by the terrible violence that took place in Tucson on Saturday. We grieve for Judge John Roll and for all those who have died. We stand in prayerful solidarity with their families and friends. We pray for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and for all who were injured and for those who love and care for them.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Governor Jan Brewer had been scheduled to deliver her state of the state address and she did. But the text was new.
SIEGEL: Tragedy and terror sometime comes from the shadows and steal our joy and take away our peace. That happened on Saturday when a gunman took away people we love, innocent people, and outstanding public servants.
NORRIS: Governor Brewer is a conservative Republican who endorsed Gabrielle Giffords' opponent in the 2010 campaign. But today she called Giffords "my good friend" and prayed for her recovery.
SIEGEL: NPR's Ari Shapiro reports on a solemn day in the nation's capital.
ARI SHAPIRO: On a freezing Washington morning, a few hundred White House staffers huddled in their coats on the South Lawn. Just before 11 a.m., the president and first lady emerged wearing long overcoats. They didn't say a word. A member of the Marine band struck a long silver chime with a hammer to mark the beginning of the moment of silence.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHIME)
SHAPIRO: Today's White House meeting with French President Nicolas Sarkozy went ahead as planned. Mr. Obama sat next to Sarkozy in the Oval Office and said, all of us are still grieving and in shock. But he urged Americans to focus on the courage that people showed outside of that grocery store in Tucson - the citizens who wrestled the gunman to the ground and the intern who ran into the line of fire to rescue his boss.
SHAPIRO: Part of what I think that speaks to is the best of America, even in the face of such mindless violence.
SHAPIRO: The president said he has been in touch with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and other officials about planning a memorial service in the next several days.
SHAPIRO: But I think it's going to be important, I think, for the country as a whole, as well as the people in Arizona to feel as if we are speaking directly to our sense of loss, but also speaking to our hopes for the future and how out of this tragedy we can come together as a stronger nation.
SHAPIRO: In the halls of Congress, people lined up outside of Congresswoman Giffords' office to sign a guestbook. Rachel Pfeffer(ph) from Maryland was one of them.
NORRIS: I just wrote that they're in my thoughts and prayers and wishing the congresswoman a speedy recovery. I just wanted her to know that we're all pulling for her, and not just the people at the top, but the little people, too.
SHAPIRO: Ari Shapiro, NPR News, the White House.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Fourteen people survived Saturday's shooting, eight remain hospitalized. We're going to take a few moments now to remember the six who lost their lives, the men, women and one child ranged in age from nine to 79.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
The youngest, Christina Taylor Green, was born on September 11th, 2001. She was a third grader and had recently been elected to her school's student council. She was a girl of many passions - animals, dance, baseball. Her grandfather was in the major leagues. She told her parents that when she grew up, she wanted a career that would let her help others less fortunate.
NORRIS: Gabe Zimmerman was Gabrielle Giffords' director of community outreach. He was the organizer of Saturday's Congress On Your Corner event, and many past ones too. He would stand beside Giffords and take down names, numbers and concerns. His colleagues say he had a real way with people. He was 30 years old and engaged to be married.
SIEGEL: Gentle, fair and thoughtful is how colleagues described Judge John Roll. Roll was Arizona's chief federal judge. He was appointed by President George H.W. Bush. He attended Catholic Mass daily. And it was after Mass on Saturday that he stopped by to say hi to his friend Gabrielle Giffords. He was 63.
NORRIS: Seventy-six-year-old Dorothy Morris and her husband, George, were high school sweethearts. She became a secretary and a homemaker and he an airline pilot. They'd been married for more than 50 years. And friends say they still acted like newlyweds. They would do everything together, and they were together on Saturday when the shooting began. She died at the scene. He was shot in the shoulder, but survived.
SIEGEL: Phyllis Schneck was a mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. Her daughter told The Washington Post, she did all that June Cleaver stuff. She sewed, she cooked, she loved crafts. She was a Jersey girl most of her life. But a decade ago she started spending winters in Tucson. Friends in New Jersey say she'd send letters home just to say hello and chew the fat. She was 79 years old.
NORRIS: On Saturday, Dorwan Stoddard had reportedly gone to Gabby Giffords' event to tell her that she was doing a good job. At 76, Stoddard was a retired construction worker and a leader in his church. Witnesses say he died while shielding his wife. She's being treated for a leg wound, but she's expected to recover.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
As NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, the secretary is using gulf Arab leaders to keep the pressure on.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Dubai is so close to Iran that the port is filled with Iranian trading vessels and the U.S. consulate has a special office for Iran watchers. So this is one place where the U.S. wants to see international sanctions implemented. Clinton told a women's talk show in Abu Dhabi before coming to Dubai that it is in this region's best interest to keep financial and other pressures on Iran.
HILLARY CLINTON: The most recent analysis is that the sanctions have been working. They have made it much more difficult for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambition. Iran's had technological problems that have made it slow down its timetable.
KELEMEN: But Clinton is walking a fine line on this trip trying to make sure that any new analysis won't dampen the resolve of the region to deal with Iran.
CLINTON: I would ask you, those of you from countries here in the region, if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, won't you believe that you have to have a nuclear weapon, too? I mean, it will be an arms race that will be extremely dangerous. So it's first and foremost in the interest of the region to persuade Iran not to pursue nuclear weapons.
KELEMEN: Diplomatic cables recently released by WikiLeaks showed that many in this region are worried about Iranian intentions. The ruler of Abu Dhabi was quoted in one as comparing Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Hitler, warning he could drag the region into war.
CLINTON: Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Dubai.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Gabrielle Giffords' brother-in-law, astronaut Scott Kelly, said this from the International Space Station today.
C: These days, we're constantly reminded of the unspeakable acts of violence and damage we can inflict upon one another, not just with our actions but also with our irresponsible words.
SIEGEL: Our irresponsible words. As we've heard, there's been much discussion of the tone of current political discourse and the relationship between fighting words and violence.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
During the last election, for instance, Sarah Palin's political action committee posted an online map, locating 20 vulnerable House Democrats who voted for the health care overhaul. Each district, including that of Congresswoman Giffords, was denoted with a crosshairs symbol. Some say there is no causal relationship between campaign rhetoric like that and violence.
SIEGEL: Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking House Democrat, says there is. And he joins us now. Welcome to the program, Congressman.
SIEGEL: Thank you so much for having me.
SIEGEL: What do say to people who, based on what they know in this case of the man who's been arrested and charged with a crime, say this isn't politics, it's not about political discourse, this is about mental illness?
SIEGEL: Well, you know, I think that those of us who are armed with the gift of gab are responsible for what we say and how we say it. And when people hear things and feel that they can make a martyr out of themselves because of the discourse around the political arena, they sometimes react with ways that are socially unacceptable. But that does not absolve us.
SIEGEL: Beyond self-restraint and self-policing, if you will, would you support, say, a move that would extend the legal bar against threatening the president or the vice president, to any threats made against any member of Congress?
SIEGEL: I thought it was very unseemly for President Obama to be appearing at events - and I believe it was in Arizona - and for people to go to the event with guns strapped to their sides. What's that all about? These symbols influence people and those people who are not mentally together may take it to a level which we did not intend.
SIEGEL: But is there a danger of going too far, in that political language is filled with images of war? A campaign is called a campaign because there were military campaigns before there were political campaigns. Some people say if we do this, we'll end up censoring people to an unfortunate degree.
SIEGEL: Well, I don't know that it's necessarily to an unfortunate degree. Would you say it is unfortunate restraint of free speech when a justice said it does not give us the right to yell fire in a crowded theater? I don't think so. And I do believe that people can tell the difference between the sight of a gun and an asterisk. If you want to target a political district, put an asterisk on it. The sight of a gun barrel, I think, carries a different connotation.
SIEGEL: You're an African-American from South Carolina, and you came up at a time when a black man who asserted himself could face really serious consequence. And there was nothing unusual about death threats at that time. Does this really compare to, say, the 1960s in South Carolina?
SIEGEL: And I really believe that everybody needs to take a look at where we are pushing things, and may need to take a serious step back and evaluate what's going on here.
SIEGEL: Well, Congressman Clyburn, thank you very much for talking to us.
SIEGEL: Thank you so much for having me.
SIEGEL: That's Congressman James Clyburn, Democrat of South Carolina.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And, Martin, this is the first time we've seen Jared Loughner since his alleged shooting spree. How did he look? How did he act?
MARTIN KASTE: He replied in mono syllables. He replied yes when it was appropriate to. He had very short answers to the judge when required. While he was standing there in front of the judge, his new attorney was sort of rubbing his back every now and then kind of keeping him focus. She, at one point, whispered to him, are you okay? But he responded to questions appropriately, and he seemed to be very (unintelligible).
SIEGEL: And remind us, again, of the charges that Loughner faces so far.
KASTE: Martin, was anything actually decided during today's appearance?
KASTE: So it's that kind of thing that's been taken cared of. It was also decided that he will be held without bail. That he's a threat to the community, and they set the next date for his next appearance.
SIEGEL: And as for the investigation of this shooting and as reporters dig in some more, what's the latest that we've learned about Jared Loughner's life?
KASTE: We're told from law enforcement sources that his parents have been called to the college. They've come there to talk about this. It's not clear how seriously they took it. We're also getting some sense that the investigators are moving very quickly as they put together the timeline. For example, it's now clear that he bought quite a bit of ammunition on the morning of the shooting.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Martin.
KASTE: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: NPR's Martin Kaste at the federal courthouse in Phoenix.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Thank you so much for making time for us.
BEN MCGAHEE: You're welcome.
NORRIS: What do you remember about Jared Loughner?
MCGAHEE: Well, he seemed like a normal guy, you know, just walking in, until he started to kind of misbehave, and he seemed like he's under the influence of drugs, like he was red in the face. He was smiling very big, like he was high on something, and certain body parts were shaking or trembling.
NORRIS: You said he would misbehave in class. What would he do?
MCGAHEE: Right, yeah. He would come out with these senseless outbursts. It's like he would say like how can you deny math instead of accepting it?
NORRIS: Was he aggressive or loud when he was saying these things?
MCGAHEE: No, he was not very loud or anything, and he didn't show any signs of violence, just random outbursts. He even wrote a few scribblings on the quiz. One thing in particular, he wrote what was called a mayhem fest. When I saw that on the quiz, you know, I became very concerned for the safety of our students in the classroom and for the school as well.
NORRIS: Just those words, mayhem fest?
MCGAHEE: Right. And it was written in bold capital print, written in pencil and three exclamation points, along with some other random sketches or scribblings on the margins of the paper.
NORRIS: How did you handle a student like that?
MCGAHEE: I mean, it was challenging. You know, you didn't know the next day at class if he was going to bring a weapon, and he was going to try to end everybody's lives. One of the students, she was scared for her life after her first day, and she told me that personally after class. It got me concerned that every time I looked at him with a stern look and even when I wrote on the whiteboard, I would keep a lookout the corner of my eye just to keep close surveillance on him and make sure he was not doing anything unusual or pulling out a weapon out of his bag or anything to hurt anyone.
NORRIS: What did you do about this? Is there a protocol at your school for reporting students that you worry might turn violent?
MCGAHEE: Yes. There is a specific protocol. We need to contact either the counselor or the dean immediately, so I decided to follow it and do that.
NORRIS: Was there anything that he said in the classroom that somehow expressed his political views or things that he might have been angry about?
MCGAHEE: The day we got everybody from class, he said that it violated his rights of free speech. And he had pointed to the Constitution on the wall, and, yeah, I told him I'm not violating your free speech. It's just that your free speech is limited in class because you can't just say any kind of random stuff. It has to be math related. And if you say anything that's irrelevant to class or disrupting class, I have to ask you to leave.
NORRIS: And did he leave?
MCGAHEE: He eventually was removed from the class after the third or fourth week. With the help of the counselor and the dean, he was not to return to the campus, again, either.
NORRIS: We have to be very careful here because there's still much that is not known. But when you look back at how this case was handled and your concerns about him in your classroom, was there a failure of any kind to follow through on this case to make sure that authorities knew that this was someone who might pose a danger at some point?
MCGAHEE: I don't think there was a failure as far as the community college goes. I think that we did a pretty good job, you know, the counselors and the dean and myself got involved and working as a team to remove him from class. Maybe, he could have been removed a little bit earlier, but, you know, that's (unintelligible) how it goes at the school so I think being a community college that's the best they could.
NORRIS: Ben McGahee, thank you very much for making time and talk to us.
MCGAHEE: Oh, you're welcome.
NORRIS: In a statement on Saturday, it described the suspension of Jared Loughner last year. After he agreed to leave the school, the college said it sent a letter indicating that if he wanted to return, he would have to present a clearance from a mental health professional that he, quote, "does not present a danger to himself or others."
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Welcome to the program.
GABRIEL CHIN: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: Now, I'm just curious. What are they looking for specifically in that background check?
CHIN: They're looking for criminal record and they're also looking for significant mental health history. And also other things that make a person ineligible to own a firearm: If you have a dishonorable discharge from the armed forces, if you are an undocumented person, if you are a habitual user or addicted to unlawful drugs, then you can't get a firearm.
NORRIS: In the case of Jared Loughner, he had been arrested before for possession of drug paraphernalia, but the charge was dismissed. And so I want to make sure I understand this correctly. An arrest itself does not keep someone from getting a gun; it's the conviction that matters.
CHIN: So for example, if a person is charged with armed robbery and murder, but the charges don't result in a conviction, then after the charges are dismissed, they can get a firearm.
NORRIS: Now, another reason that people are not able to pass background checks is if they've been adjudicated to be, as the law says, mentally defective. Again here, Loughner clearly showed some signs of mental instability, but that's not something the courts weighed in about.
CHIN: That's right. You have to actually be committed to a mental institution or to be adjudicated mentally ill in a proceeding, for example, that maybe will put somebody else in charge of your assets or making decisions for your property and your person. But simply being mentally ill does not prevent you, under Arizona law or federal law, from getting a firearm.
NORRIS: We do know that Loughner had been asked to leave the Pima Community College because they were concerned about his mental stability and the thought that he might pose a threat. Something like that wouldn't count as a strike against him in a background check.
CHIN: If you've been kicked out of school for plagiarism, for example, that might prevent you from getting a security clearance. But it has nothing to do with your ability to get a firearm.
NORRIS: And in Arizona, carrying these so-called extended clips, that is legal.
CHIN: That bill expired, and a number of other states and cities imposed their own prohibitions on high capacity magazines. But Arizona is one of those jurisdictions that has absolutely no limit on the number of bullets that can be contained in a magazine.
NORRIS: How would you rank Arizona's gun laws?
CHIN: I think it's fairly clear that they're among the most lenient in the United States. There are - every year, there's legislation to make them even more lenient, more permissive. And it's a state where the idea is that everyone who is an adult and a citizen or a lawful permanent resident is entitled to carry guns and own firearms, that our law in Arizona treats it as a normal, regular part of life.
NORRIS: Professor Chin, thank you very much.
CHIN: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: I've been speaking with Gabriel Chin. He's a professor of law at the University of Arizona, and he studies policy on firearms.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And as NPR's Tom Goldman reports, that has stirred new rumblings about reform.
TOM GOLDMAN: The investigation reportedly continues, and there's still some suspicion rattling around that Newton knew what his dad was up to and shouldn't have been declared eligible for tonight's game.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
GOLDMAN: Should Cam Newton be able to play in this game?
BRIAN KING: I think he should. They don't have any concrete evidence on him and - but until they have concrete evidence, they can't stop him from playing.
GOLDMAN: Besides, said his buddy James Roberts, also from Selma, maybe we need to point that finger of suspicion elsewhere.
JAMES ROBERTS: And, you know, the NCAA, here, lately, it seems like they're making all the rules up anyway.
GOLDMAN: Roberts was referring to that equally controversial NCAA decision allowing several Ohio State players to play in last week's Sugar Bowl even though they'd been suspended for multiple games next season because of rules violations.
MARK EMMERT: I understand why that case causes people to scratch their head.
GOLDMAN: Law Professor Peter Goplerud advocated for change in a series of articles in the mid-1990s. Goplerud advocated for paying players. He says, all these years later, the need for reform is as great, if not greater, with so much money coming into schools from revenue-generating sports.
PETER GOPLERUD: The University of Texas, a year ago, being first school ever to pass the $10 million mark in annual revenues just from royalties from licensed products.
GOLDMAN: Mark Emmert says, we will not and should not ever pay athletes. Scholarships are sufficient, he says, and the NCAA offers emergency funds for when they're not. Besides, Emmert asserts this image of athletic departments awash in cash just isn't true. Last year, he says, only 14 schools in the country had athletic programs running in the black. All the more reason, says sports agent Donald Yee, to push reform even farther.
DONALD YEE: I think there are better business models out there, more innovative business models that can be more efficient economically.
GOLDMAN: Yee says the NCAA's tight reins on amateurism and player compensation prevent him even from offering bottled water to college athletes who visit his L.A. office. The business model he's promoting pays players. More dramatically, it has the university put out for bid the rights to operate the football program to a third party: a hedge fund, private equity company or wealthy alum. Yee uses the example of UCLA.
YEE: UCLA would negotiate within that agreement certain profit splits with that private third party, and the private third party would do all the work in operating the entire program.
GOLDMAN: To all this, the NCAA's Emmert says, basically, when pigs fly. But Yee says, it doesn't matter the NCAA won't budge. College sports are fluid. Look at, for instance, all the recent shifting of college conferences with money being the driving force. For now, college players like Cam Newton himself think about what it would mean to get a piece of the financial pie.
CAM NEWTON: Would I like players to get paid? You know, I'd be lying in saying that I wish we could get paid. But do we? No.
GOLDMAN: Tom Goldman, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As we reported on Friday, the National Football League has changed its overtime rules for the playoffs. On Friday, we also asked listeners about other rule changes they'd like to see in their favorite or not so favorite sports. Now, some of your suggestions.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
First, the somewhat practical. Mark Holmes(ph) of San Diego sent us this tweet, and that explains his use of language. Get rid of extra point in football. Ninety-eight percent of points are made, so why bother? Make them all run for two extra points.
SIEGEL: Ron Dylewski(ph) of Aspinwall, Pennsylvania, suggests: All players in every sport should be enjoined from talking to refs, linesmen or umpires, period. Violation leads to immediate expulsion from the game. In one stroke, we eliminate a huge amount of unnecessary high- priced whining and we get on with the games.
NORRIS: Other suggestions were not so practical. Craig Kenworthy(ph) of Seattle had this idea for pro baseball. Put a time clock on the pitcher and make him back up 10 feet for every violation. After a few three and two counts thrown from the center field, the game should speed up.
SIEGEL: Phillip Davis(ph) of Gorham, Maine, has this suggestion for the NBA. For far too long, there's been too much human activity within that hallowed cylinder of space above the mouth of a basketball basket. Return this realm to a wilderness where only rubber and the stain of human sweat is permitted. Raise the basket to 11 feet.
NORRIS: Chris Brown(ph) of DeKalb, Illinois, writes: Change the name of the sport of football. Let soccer have it already. You use your foot to move a ball. It works for everyone else. So let's get a new name for what was American football. I'll nominate the name American handegg.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: And finally, an entire genre of letters from listeners who think there isn't enough skin in sports. Shawn Skabelund(ph) of Flagstaff, Arizona, writes this. I've been teaching anatomy for artists for nearly 10 years. Each fall semester, I tell my students how wonderful it would be to watch a professional football game where both teams line up against each other nude. What a learning experience this would be to learn anatomy. I propose that each team is required to wear no jerseys, no pads, no helmets, no shoes for one Sunday afternoon, preferably on a cold winter Sunday.
NORRIS: Tom Como(ph) of Ellicott City, Maryland, writes: At the last Olympics, it seemed like the swimming competition was more about the suits than the swimmers. It seems to me there's an easy solution. Go back to the original Olympic competition rules. Swimmers should compete without suits. Camera angles for the broadcasts could get to be tricky, but if we can put the first down line on a moving field, we can pixelate or block out FCC-barred moving parts.
SIEGEL: And Lara Fishman(ph) of Los Angeles tweeted this: Institute mandatory nudity in cricket to make it interesting enough for Americans to want to watch it.
NORRIS: International Cricket Council, are you listening?
SIEGEL: Well, thanks to all who wrote in with their rule suggestions. Reading them was every bit as fun as watching this weekend's American handegg playoffs.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NORRIS: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This week marks the first anniversary of the earthquake that destroyed much of the Haitian capital and left one and a half million homeless. Housing remains one of the biggest challenges facing Haiti, as it tries to recover from the quake. One year after the disaster, more than a million people are still living in tents and make-shift huts around Port-au-Prince.
As NPR's Jason Beaubien reports, thousands of people whove grown tired of these camps are now starting to build houses in fields just north of the capital.
JASON BEAUBIEN: Cabaret is the new frontier of Port-au-Prince. Its a place where a guy can grab a piece of land, put down a shack, start a new life. Over the last six months, thousands of squatters have staked out plots here on what used to be scrubby vacant hills. There are no proper roads, just tracks worn in the dirt and paths that wind amidst the haphazardly-fenced plots.
There are so many new residents here that different parts of the encampment already have different names. Theres Jerusalem, Canaan, Bacca Zuwe. At a section called Area B, theres a single hand pump for water. When we arrived, the well was locked. A gaggle of children had gathered with buckets waiting for the well manager to show up with the key.
Mr. PIERRE JEAN LEFEN (Well Manager): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Eighteen-year-old Pierre Jean Lefen is the man with the key. He says the water is locked because this is a private, not a public, well. In fact, its the only well near here. The kids each pay him roughly 25 cents to fill their plastic five-gallon buckets. Lefen says this area is booming, but theres no government services, no electricity, no toilets, no schools.
Mr. LEFEN: (Through translation) None of us around here can go to school. We dont have any way to go to school. Those kids you can see here, they stay all day long without being able to go to school.
BEAUBIEN: There are, however, small businesses popping up on the hillside, in amongst the huts - small grocery stores, a dentists office. Thirty-year-old Isdres Baptiste runs a combination barber shop-photo studio out of a red sheet-metal shack.
Mr. ISDRES BAPTISTE: (Speaking foreign language)
BEAUBIEN: Baptiste says before the earthquake, his shop was on Delmas 31, a bustling street in the capital. On weekends, he says he was always busy with people getting their hair cut and ordering photos for birthdays or other celebrations.
Baptiste says the problem now is that the people dont have any money. Many lost their jobs, others are scraping just to get by. He says photos and haircuts are now considered luxuries.
(Soundbite of pig)
BEAUBIEN: The growing encampments on the hillsides of Cabaret are different from the overly crowded camps in the heart of Port-au-Prince. Here, the shacks are spread out. People have planted vegetable gardens. Pigs root around in the dust. Theres room to keep flocks of chickens.
Cabaret, however, lies between a line of steep, denuded mountains and the ocean. In the run-up to Hurricane Tomas in November, aid agencies tried to evacuate 8,000 people from a nearby tent encampment out of fear that it could get flooded in a major storm.
But concerns about floods and hurricanes arent keeping people away. Pastor Amos Noel has erected a small open air church in the area.
Mr. AMOS NOEL (Pastor): (Through translation) Day by day you see a new family move in. For example, today there was a truck that pouring sand and stone down here for a house to be built. Every single day you see a new family, new face come to live here.
BEAUBIEN: If space is open, someone takes it. Most of the houses are simple huts, but some people are building solid, cinder-block buildings. One even has a garage.
For decades, Haiti has had a chaotic land title system. After the quake, with so many government buildings destroyed, its even less clear who owns what.
Aid groups say one of the biggest obstacles to building new or even transitional housing is the lack of clear land title in the Haitian capital. Here this isnt yet a problem because the squatters are simply ignoring the issue.
The pastor says this is government land. Others say it was abandoned. What is clear is that thousands of Haitians have given up on waiting for the government or aid groups to move them out of the overcrowded camps in Port-au-Prince.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
You don't have to be a good speller to be a good writer. That's the message from the Oregon Department of Education.
Tomorrow morning, Oregon students will start taking their standardized writing exams. And for the first time, those doing their essays online will get to use spell check.
From Oregon Public Broadcasting, Rob Manning reports.
(Soundbite of conversation)
ROB MANNING: For some students at East Portland's Parkrose High School, using spell check on the state's required writing exam makes a lot of sense. They say it's on word processing software; it's even on their cell phones.
Jerry Hunter is a junior. He says spell check is everywhere.
Mr. JERRY HUNTER: Nobody is a perfect speller, you know? People have gone through school. They haven't done so well in spelling and still turn out successful. It is a good luxury to have. It is a good tool to just keep with you. So I don't think kids should be denied of that, and I think it might even benefit us in the future.
MANNING: But some of Hunter's classmates worry that spell check is a crutch they don't want to rely on.
When junior Ashley Smith sits down for her test, she'd rather not have spell check, because she won't have it when the SAT or Advanced Placement exams come along.
Ms. ASHLEY SMITH: If we always constantly use spell check, then what about when we get in situations like that? When we don't have it, we're going to be completely confused and maybe even fail it, because it's one of the parts that they grade you on.
MANNING: Oregon will allow students starting in the seventh grade to use spell check to point out misspelled words, but it won't correct them for the student. It also won't catch grammar mistakes or tell students if they used the wrong spelling of there, for instance.
State education officials counter that another important test allows spell check, the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP, often called the nation's report card.
State schools superintendent Susan Castillo says it's important to incorporate newer technology into assessments. She's hoping that spell check can help students focus on more abstract writing skills. She compares it to architects who use software to do their actual drafting.
Ms. SUSAN CASTILLO (Superintendent of Public Instruction, Oregon): Now, with the use of computers, that work that basic function work is done for them, and they are free to be creative and innovative.
Ms. NERISSA EDIZA (English Teacher, Parkrose High School): This is not to say that English teachers aren't still teaching spelling.
MANNING: Nerissa Ediza teaches English at Parkrose High School.
Ms. EDIZA: There's also students who struggle with things like dyslexia or are good writers but that one little thing gets in the way of them passing. And this is a high-stakes test. They have to pass it in order to graduate.
MANNING: But not every Oregon student will get to use spell check on their writing exams. That's because, despite the Portland area's reputation for technology firms, computer shortages in schools mean only about one-quarter of students are expected to take this year's writing test online.
Michelle Wood teaches English at David Douglas High, the state's largest high school. Her students won't have computers for the writing test.
Ms. MICHELLE WOOD (English Teacher, David Douglas High School): You can't compare a student that's taken a hand, you know, paper-pencil test to a student who's typed up a test and had any sort of technological advances like spell check.
MANNING: Oregon education officials contend that all students can use dictionaries and other spelling tools, but they plan to watch the results closely to see if there's a significant difference. Regardless, they say online testing is the direction the state and likely the nation is headed.
For NPR News, I'm Rob Manning in Portland.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
It is Hungary's turn at the rotating helm of the European Union presidency, and already, things are off to a rough start.
Hungary's government has managed to outrage some EU member states, pro-democracy advocates and others. At issue are several measures that critics say represent a dangerous erosion of democratic principles and a lurch toward autocratic rule.
From Budapest, NPR's Eric Westervelt reports.
ERIC WESTERVELT: In a snow-dusted park in central Budapest, tourists snap photos of the beautiful neo-Gothic parliament building as EU flags hang together with Hungary's.
This is a proud time for Hungary as it takes over the rotating EU presidency, yet some Hungarians are worried that many of the very values the country is expected to uphold as an EU member and as president are now under threat.
Mr. GABOR HORVATH (Deputy Editor, Nepszabadsag): The law provides total control to the government over all the media, both public and private.
WESTERVELT: Gabor Horvath is deputy editor of the daily Nepszabadsag, the largest circulation broadsheet in Hungary. The new package of media laws created by Prime Minister Victor Orban's conservative government allows Hungary's five-person Media Council, all loyalists of Orban's ruling Fidesz Party, to impose big fines on all news outlets if the board deems reporting is unbalanced or violates a host of vaguely defined terms such as public morality.
Newspapers can be docked the equivalent of half-a-million dollars per violation. Editor Horvath likens the laws to a bully with a baseball bat standing over the news desk.
Mr. HORVATH: And he says that, you know, I can smash your head, but I'm a good guy. I'm not going to do that. Now, what would you feel? All the guarantee we are having is them saying that they are nice guys. I'm not buying that.
WESTERVELT: The paper has run several blank front pages in protest. The laws have sparked international outrage and a European Commission inquiry, while the Organization of Security Cooperation in Europe called the government media council's regulatory power unprecedented in European democracies.
Gyorgy Ocsko, the legal chief of the new Media Council, insists Hungary's post-communist media need reining in, but he says the country will consider changes to the law if the EU says it's necessary.
Mr. GYORGY OCSKO (Chief, Media Council): This unfettered press freedom, it yielded some negative fruit, as well. So...
WESTERVELT: But won't this act have a huge chilling effect on journalists in Hungary?
Mr. OCSKO: I hope not. But if it is in violation of international and democratic standards, then it should be modified. If not, then this law will prevail.
WESTERVELT: In recent days, Prime Minister Orban has signaled a potential retreat on this controversy, saying he would consider changes but won't be forced into it.
The EU has also launched an inquiry into the legality of new taxes aimed mostly at foreign companies. All this is happening just as Hungary takes over the EU presidency.
Mr. LASZLO KOVACS (Former Commissioner, European Union): The rotating presidency is the one who is the face of the European Union for six months. And it's not a very beautiful face today.
WESTERVELT: Laszlo Kovacs is a former EU commissioner and member of the Hungarian parliament with the opposition Socialists. He charges that with its solid two-thirds majority in parliament, Orban's Fidesz Party has also threatened the independence of the judiciary and rammed through changes to the constitution.
When the constitutional court opposed Orban's plan to nationalize some pension funds, Orban and his party quickly eliminated the high court's power to rule on financial matters.
Mr. KOVACS: So one hour later, they presented a draft bill which curtailed the competence of the constitutional court. It was a very brutal, primitive answer to a concrete decision, a judgment of the constitutional court.
De jure it is certainly a multi-party system. De facto, it is getting closer to a one-party system.
WESTERVELT: This weekend a group of prominent European former anti-communist dissidents said Orban's concentration of power is threatening Hungary's young democracy. They appealed to the EU for help.
In an open letter, the former dissidents warned that Hungary's government, though elected democratically, is misusing its legislative majority to dismantle democracy's fundamental checks and balances.
Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Budapest.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
The president's oil spill commission today said the federal government needs to beef up oversight of the offshore oil and gas industry. The seven-member committee released a set of 15 major recommendations in its final report. One calls for a new agency within the Interior Department to police the industry.
NPR's Richard Harris has that story.
RICHARD HARRIS: The commission has already had harsh words for the oil and gas industry and its role in last April's deadly blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. But in releasing its final recommendations, commission co-chair Bob Graham said industry alone was not responsible for the catastrophe.
Mr. BOB GRAHAM (Co-chair, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill): I am sad to say that part of the answer is the fact that our government let it happen. Our regulators were consistently outmatched. The Department of Interior lacked the in-house expertise to effectively enforce regulation.
HARRIS: So, one of the commission's biggest recommendations is to revamp that part of the Interior Department. That means, among other things, getting a safety office that will rely more on science in its decisions to pay enough to attract top technical people and to be more independent than it is right now.
Commission co-chair Bill Reilly noted that in the aftermath of the spill, the Interior Department did split in two its Minerals Management Service to separate the revenue-collecting arm from its regulatory arm.
Mr. BILL REILLY (Co-chair, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill): That is a move to the good. We support that and respect it. We think it's not enough.
HARRIS: Instead, Reilly said the safety and environment office should be better insulated from economic and political pressures. One way to do that is to have a director appointed for a set term and, therefore, less vulnerable to changing political winds.
Mr. REILLY: That is the only way to ensure that revenues do not again become excessively influential in decisions relating to safety and environment.
HARRIS: One goal of this office should be to raise the safety and environmental standards expected of the industry. The commission found that Norway and the United Kingdom, to name two other nations, now have stricter regulations and better safety records.
Randall Luthi, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, didn't dispute that assertion directly, but he disagrees with the commission's conclusion that problems are systemic throughout the offshore oil and gas industry.
Mr. RANDALL LUTHI (President, National Ocean Industries Association): He looked back over the overall history of the Gulf of Mexico, and you see that it's a remarkable industry with a remarkable safety record. And I think the commission just didn't really give enough play for that.
HARRIS: But one commissioner, Terry Garcia, said it's clear that the failures here weren't simply the bad decisions on the rig that led up to the deadly blowout.
Mr. TERRY GARCIA (Commissioner, National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill): What is not disputed is that the industry was not prepared for this.
HARRIS: Nobody had the necessary gear in place to bring the blowout under control quickly or to capture the oil as it spread through and across the waters of the Gulf.
Co-chair Graham, a former senator from Florida, said Congress will need to act in order to institute some of these recommendations, and he's optimistic that it will, even in a political climate that's increasingly hostile to federal regulation.
Mr. BOB GRAHAM (Former Florida Senator): The�members of Congress understand that this is not just a typical example of government regulating a private enterprise. This is government regulating land that the government and the people of the United States own.
HARRIS: And he hopes the commission's report will be a guide to better stewardship.
Richard Harris, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Who could resist the headline: Mysterious, Green Blob in Space Explained? That comes from a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
And we've asked NPR's science correspondent Joe Palca to share the explanation with us. Hi.
JOE PALCA: Hi.
SIEGEL: And before the explanation, when did astronomers first start investigating this mysterious blob, and is blob actually a technical term among astronomers?
PALCA: Some. But I think it's, no, it's probably not, but it's close enough. Anyway, they found this thing in 2007 and it was actually found by a school teacher in the Netherlands named Hanny van Arkel. And she told at the time she knew almost nothing about astronomy, but she was looking around on Brian May's website.
SIEGEL: Brian May?
PALCA: Yes, of course, you know Brian May.
SIEGEL: Who's Brian May?
PALCA: The guitar player for Queen.
SIEGEL: Ah-ha.
PALCA: Who also happens to have a PhD in astrophysics. Anyway, he had a link on his website to something called the Galaxy Zoo. And this was a project where people were asked to help astronomers identify and characterize galaxies and they were just supposed to look at these things (unintelligible).
So, van Arkel sees this bluish greenish smudge on one of the pictures on the Galaxy Zoo website and she writes to the people, and she says, what's the smudge? And they go, we don't know. So they decided to investigate it.
SIEGEL: Smudge being another term (unintelligible).
PALCA: That's another - yeah, it's one of those.
SIEGEL: Well, what did they find? What did they think it was?
PALCA: Well, they were pretty sure that it was a cloud of gas - a huge cloud of gas almost the size the Milky Way that was glowing from some extremely bright object shining behind it. You can kind of think of it as a fog bank being lit up by a floodlight off to the side.
SIEGEL: They could see the bright object behind or they just inferred everything?
PALCA: No. They couldn't see a bright object. And that's the thing, when you see something being lit up by a bright object, you want to find the bright object. So that was the mystery in the mysterious green blob. So they started looking around and they thought, well, a quasar could light this up. That's that powerful thing at the center of galaxies, but they're bright enough, but there wasn't any quasar around.
And they looked for it and looked for it and finally, they think they've come up with the answer, which was there was a quasar around, but it turned off about 200,000 years ago.
SIEGEL: An extinct quasar.
PALCA: It's an extinct quasar. But in the time that it took for the light to get from the quasar to the cloud, it still had enough light even though it's now dead. So in about 200,000 years this cloud will go dark as well.
SIEGEL: So the explanation of the green blob is a former quasar behind a lot of stuff.
PALCA: Behind, or actually, they tell me it's off to the side because the other thing they see are these jets of sort of a jet wind, they call it, coming out of the quasar that happens when a quasar gets sucked into a black hole or ends its life near a black hole and these jets come out and they are actually pushing the cloud around and causing them to actually start to form planets inside this cloud of gas.
SIEGEL: And all this came about thanks to the Dutch schoolteacher.
PALCA: That's right. And just - by the way, if you want to talk to an astronomer about this green blob, you can call it Hanny's Voorwerp.
SIEGEL: Voorwerp.
PALCA: Voorwerp. That's the Dutch word for object. So, Hanny's object, for Hanny van Arkel.
SIEGEL: Live and learn.
PALCA: You bet.
SIEGEL: NPR's Joe Palca. Thank you.
PALCA: You're welcome.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
And we begin this hour in Tucson, where the community is gathering to remember the six people killed in Saturday's shooting rampage. This evening, there is a mass for all the victims at St. Odilia's Parish in Tucson. And President Obama arrives tomorrow for memorial service. Six people wounded in the shooting remain in the hospital at Tucson's University Medical Center. Today brought good news about the patient in the worst shape, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
NPR's Jeff Brady reports.
JEFF BRADY: Doctors have kept Giffords sedated so she can rest. They periodically wake her up to make sure her recovery is going well. Dr. Michael Lemole says he's still watching for any swelling in her brain that could lead to further damage. But he says nothing on that front has changed since yesterday.
Dr. MICHAEL LEMOLE (Neurosurgeon, Tucson University Medical Center): We've been able to back off on some of that sedation. And, in fact, she's able to generate her own breaths. She's breathing on her own. In fact, the only reason we keep that breathing tube in is to protect her airway so that she doesn't have complications like pneumonia.
BRADY: Giffords doctors still won't be specific on what kinds of disability she might face in the future. Yesterday, one of them did say there's a possibility her vision could be affected. Since the left side of her brain was injured, there will be concerns about her ability to speak and move her right side. Doctors also corrected something they said earlier - that Giffords was shot in the back of the head. They now believe she was shot in the front and the bullet exited her skull through the back on her left side.
At today's hospital briefing, several family members of those injured also spoke. Bill Hileman is the husband of Susan Hileman. She's the woman who brought nine-year-old Christina Green to see Representative Giffords last Saturday.
Mr. BILL HILEMAN: Most of what Suzy has shared with me about the specifics are on the edges of a morphine-induced haze.
BRADY: Hileman says at one point his wife asked about Christina and he had to deliver the horrible news that she was dead. Hileman says the girl's family has been very gracious but his wife will have difficulty living with what happened.
Mr. HILEMAN: I hear her in her semi-conscious ramblings screaming out, Christina, Christina, let's get out of here. Let's get out of here. And she keeps talking about the holding of hands and then the realization that she was on the ground and the bleeding was profuse. Her memory seems to end there.
BRADY: Hileman says his wife will recover from the three gunshot wounds she suffered, but it'll take a long time. He says a fractured hip is her biggest issue right now. The daughters of Mavy Stoddard also attended today's briefing. Mavy and her husband Dorwan were both at the Congress on Your Corner event on Saturday. While Mavy was released from the hospital yesterday and is doing well, Dorwan was killed. Penny Wilson says her mother believes Dorwan was a hero.
Ms. PENNY WILSON: Absolutely. She did feel that way. He heard the shots and covered my mom with his own body and protected her and saved her, yes.
BRADY: Wilson and her sister, Angela Robinson, relayed a touching story about how their mother came to marry their stepfather. The two were sixth grade sweethearts who went on to marry other people, then got back together later in life after their spouses died. At one point, the sisters were asked if they have any thoughts about the man accused of Saturday's shooting, 22-year-old Jared Loughner. Angela Robinson answered.
Ms. ROBINSON: We're not going to answer that at this time. God takes care of that.
BRADY: Robinson and her sister instead prefer to focus on the people who they said joined their stepfather as heroes that day, both at the scene at the shooting and those who've helped families like theirs since then.
Jeff Brady, NPR News, Tucson.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Late today, we heard from the family of the accused shooter, Jared Loughner, for the first time. They released a statement which included this: there are no words that can possibly express how we feel. We wish that there were, so we could make you feel better. We don't understand why this happened. It may not make any difference, but we wish we could change the heinous events of Saturday. We care very deeply about the victims and their families. We are so very sorry for their loss. That from the Loughner family.
The Tucson shootings, once again, have mental health professionals asking themselves, what could we have done? Last year, Jared Loughner's unusual behavior raised concerns at the local community college.
But as NPR's Larry Abramson reports, it is unclear whether different mental health rules could've prevented this tragedy.
LARRY ABRAMSON: The Virginia Tech shootings prompted a major reexamination of college mental health procedures. The shooter, Seuing-Hui Cho, was referred for a psychological evaluation by the school and a judge ordered him to receive outpatient treatment, though he never did.
Brian Van Brunt, president of the American College Counseling Association, says that since Virginia Tech, schools across the country have put resources in place to deal with this kind of situation.
Mr. BRIAN VAN BRUNT (President, American College Counseling Association): What we see is behavioral intervention teams and threat teams or teams that meet on almost every college campus, both community and residential schools weekly, to discuss at-risk students and to develop action plans to work with the student.
ABRAMSON: Jared Loughner attended Pima Community College from 2005 through 2010. The school has refused to talk to reporters since the shootings, but released a statement saying that Loughner had five contacts with campus police last year because of disruptive behavior in class and in the library.
After the school found a disturbing YouTube video by Loughner, he was suspended. The school told Loughner and his parents that he could return if he had a mental health exam showing he's not a threat to himself or others. Brian Van Brunt says this is standard operating procedure these days for many colleges. But he says that the school's responsibility stops here.
Mr. VAN BRUNT: For most of these cases, if a student were to act up in the classroom and then was asked to complete an evaluation and they chose not to, there's no more authority they have to have that completed beyond having the student removed from school.
ABRAMSON: Under Arizona law, the school could have gone further. After Virginia Tech, Virginia changed its procedures to make sure that people under a court order do get treatment. Other states have altered their regulations, often in response to other violent acts. Arizona already has a pretty flexible law for forcing people to seek treatment.
Suzanne Hodges with the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona says the law there allows a court to intervene early and require an evaluation.
Ms. SUZANNE HODGES (Chief Compliance Officer): You don't have to be to the point where you just cannot take care of yourself, but you also don't have to be imminently dangerous to yourself or to others.
ABRAMSON: Taking this step is fairly common. Hodges says at any given time, about 800 people in Pima County are under court order to get treatment. That's out of a population of a million people. Public health officials say Jared Loughner was not getting publicly financed treatment. We don't know whether he received treatment privately.
Suzanne Hodges says if someone had reported Loughner to a court, there would've been one important consequence.
Ms. HODGES: If you are actually court ordered for treatment, then you can no longer be an owner of a firearm.
ABRAMSON: Advocates for the mentally ill say this shooting comes at a time when funds for treatment have been cut back substantially.
Michael Fitzpatrick of the National Alliance on Mental Illness says that after Virginia Tech, then Virginia governor, Tim Kaine, boosted mental health funding in his state.
Mr. MICHAEL FITZPATRICK (Executive Director, National Alliance on Mental Illness): The unfortunate outcome, though, in the years since is that money's been largely cut because of budget deficits, the recession.
ABRAMSON: Fitzpatrick and others are concerned the reaction to this shooting will to be to blame people who need treatment and further isolate them. They say people with psychological problems are, in fact, more likely to be the victims of violent crime and need to be encouraged to seek help.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Our coverage yesterday of the Tucson shootings and their aftermath generated a lot of listener comments and some helpful facts. First, my co-host Michele Norris spoke yesterday with one of Jared Loughner's instructors at Pima County Community College, Ben McGahey, who related this anecdote about Loughner.
Mr. BEN MCGAHEY (Instructor, Pima County Community College): He even wrote a few scribblings on the quiz. One thing in particular he wrote was called: mayhem fest.
MICHELE NORRIS: Just those words: mayhem fest?
Mr. MCGAHEY: Right. And it was written in bold capital print, written in pencil and three exclamation points.
SIEGEL: McGahey told us this incident made him very concerned. Well, Yucca Keller(ph) of Minneapolis had this response. Mayhem fest is a rock concert that was in Arizona in July of 2010 and not some sort of bizarre threat. And the listener is correct. Mayhem Festival features heavy metal bands and it tours the country each summer.
Well, moving on, we heard some strong opinions about my interview with Democratic Congressman James Clyburn about the tone of political discourse. Our introduction mentioned an example that's come up often in the media since Saturday's shooting. It's the map of the U.S. created last year by Sarah Palin's political action committee. The map identified, as if within the crosshairs of a gun, congressional districts held by Democrats who voted for the health care bill, including Gabrielle Giffords. Well, Congressman Clyburn was critical of that map.
Representative JAMES CLYBURN (Democrat, South Carolina): If you want a target a political district, put an asterisk on it. The sight of a gun barrel, I think carries a different connotation.
SIEGEL: Well, Frank Darr(ph) of Missouri City, Texas, emailed this: I am certain that both NPR and Representative Clyburn are aware of an identical map targeting Republican districts that was posted by the Democratic Leadership Council in 2004.
And Pam Tanner of Austin, Texas adds that she is disappointed in NPR. She writes this: I have heard absolutely no evidence from any news source that the man was affected by political rhetoric. And she adds, quit building news stories on speculation.
Finally, we have one correction about one of the victims of the shooting. We misidentified Dorothy Morris. We used the wrong last name. She was 76 years old. Her husband of 50 years, George Morris, was also shot and survived.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is meeting with top Chinese government officials this week in Beijing. At the top of the agenda is how to deal with the nuclear threat posed by North Korea. Today, Secretary Gates said he believes North Korea is on track to develop a missile within the next five years that could target the U.S.
NPR's Rachel Martin reports.
RACHEL MARTIN: The concern is that a North Korean attack could actually reach American territory. Here's Secretary Gates.
Secretary ROBERT GATES (Department of Defense): With the North Koreans' continuing development of nuclear weapons and their development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, North Korea is becoming a direct threat to the United States.
MARTIN: The key here is the combination, the nuclear warhead and the missile. Gates said North Korea could develop long-range capability by 2016. Victor Cha is a senior fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Mr. VICTOR CHA (Senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and International Studies): What he is trying to convey is that North Korea poses an existential security threat not just to allies in the region, but to the United States and even its homeland. And I think that is meant to convey to the North Koreans, but also to the Chinese, how seriously the United States takes this threat.
MARTIN: The problem, says Cha, is getting China to take it just as seriously. China is North Korea's most powerful ally and has the potential to influence North Korea's actions.
Mr. CHA: Chinese behavior, it looks as though they really do not see North Korea as a security threat. They see it as a security problem, but not as a security threat to countries in the region or the United States.
MARTIN: Secretary Gates didn't make any direct requests of the Chinese. But he did suggest that it may be time for North Korea to put a moratorium on missile and nuclear testing. Because, while it's important to get North Korea back to the negotiating table, Gates said he wants to avoid what's become an unending cycle. North Korea acts aggressively and the international community scrambles to avert a crisis.
Rachel Martin, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Robert Siegel.
In recent years, the issue of gun control has all but disappeared from the debate in Congress. Despite incidents of mass violence, including the shootings at Virginia Tech, lawmakers have been reluctant to propose or even discuss new gun legislation. Proponents hope that Saturdays rampage in Tucson my change that.
NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR: It's been a lost decade for those who would restrict access to guns. In 2004, the ban on so-called assault weapons expired and Congress failed to renew it. In recent years, new federal laws have allowed guns in the national parks. Some states now allow people to carry concealed weapons without a permit.
Last year, Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley of Illinois, tried to get a hearing on the so-called Gun Show loophole, which allows gun buyers to avoid a background check if they purchase a firearm from a non-registered dealer.
Representative MIKE QUIGLEY (Democrat, Illinois): Just to show you, though, the climate in D.C. about this, before this incident, my staff and I couldnt get a hearing on closing the Gun Show loophole. You know, I dont believe there was a single congressional hearing in D.C. this whole year.
NAYLOR: And that was when the House was under the control of Democrats, who at one time were seen as more sympathetic to gun control measures. Lately, as Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia showed in his campaign last year, thats no longer always the case.
(Soundbite of a campaign ad)
Governor JOE MANCHIN (Democrat, West Virginia): I sued EPA and Ill take dead aim...
(Soundbite of gunfire)
Gov. MANCHIN: ...at the Cap and Trade bill.
NAYLOR: It should be noted that Manchin was shooting at a paper target in his ad, in a state where hunting and guns are part of the culture.
But Paul Helmke, president of the Brady campaign, which supports tougher gun laws, says the Manchin ad is typical of the state of play in the Capitol.
Mr. PAUL HELMKE (President, Brady Campaign): Most of our elected officials have wanted to run away from the gun issue. Theyve been doing that for years. Too many in the one party just march lockstep to the NRA. And too many in the other party are afraid of the NRA. So they avoid the issue.
NAYLOR: Lawmakers may only be reflecting public opinion. According to a Gallup poll released in October, 44 percent of Americans thought gun laws should be more strict. Compare that to 2000 when 62 percent wanted stricter gun laws, and 1990 when the number favoring stricter gun laws was 78 percent.
In the wake of the Tucson shooting, backers of tighter gun restriction say it's time to once again address the issue.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (New York, New York): Based on what we know so far, the system that is supposed to protect us from dangerous and deranged people has failed once again.
NAYLOR: Some lawmakers are focusing on trying to ban the type of magazine the alleged shooter had attached to his gun. It held some 30 shots.
Democratic Congressman Mike Quigley.
Rep. QUIGLEY: With a 30-round clip, you're not defending your home. You're not hunting deer. You're hunting people.
NAYLOR: Meanwhile, Republican Congressman Peter King of New York announced today he plans to introduce legislation banning anyone from carrying a loaded gun within 1,000 feet of a federal official, from the president down to a member of Congress.
Representative PETER KING (Republican, New York): This legislation, I believe is essential. I believe it's important. And I always believe if we can take a horrible tragedy and attempt to get something good out of it, then all is not lost.
NAYLOR: But opponents of tighter gun laws are not letting down their guard. Chris Knox of the Firearms Coalition says a law outlawing high-capacity magazines is bound to be ineffective.
Mr. CHRIS KNOX (Director of Communication, The Firearms Coalition): Im not that good and I can change a magazine in about a second and a half. It doesnt take that much you drop the magazine, you put the new one in and you go back.
Anytime you focus on the instrumentality of an act like this, you're focusing your efforts in the wrong place.
NAYLOR: Knox says efforts should be focused on preventing people with mental illnesses from obtaining firearms, and that may be one area where gun control opponents and backers can find some common ground.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
State legislatures are setting priorities for the New Year in attempting the difficult job of balancing their budgets. A report from the U.S. Census Bureau released this week shows a 30 percent decline in state revenues in 2009. And that means most states are facing big budget gaps.
Newly-inaugurated governors are looking for ways to create jobs and cut spending, some have even promised tax cuts.
But NPR's Kathy Lohr reports that those promises may be hard to keep.
KATHY LOHR: Governors are taking office under enormous pressure to turn their state budgets around. In California, the nations oldest governor, Democrat Jerry Brown, is facing a $25 billion budget shortfall. He promised to be transparent but acknowledged the budget process will be painful.
Governor JERRY BROWN (Democrat, California): Choices have to be made and difficult decisions taken. At this stage in my life, I've not come here to embrace delay and denial.
LOHR: In Florida, Republican Governor Rick Scott is facing a budget gap of at least $3 billion and a 12 percent unemployment rate.
Governor RICK SCOTT (Republican, Florida): The people of Florida elected me to get this state back to work, and I believe in this mission.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
LOHR: Scott promised to fight what he calls the axis of unemployment, by lowering taxes, reducing regulation and litigation, and he vowed to make government accountable.
Gov. SCOTT: Our current problems are absolutely solvable and our future is in our hands. We are resilient people.
LOHR: But exactly what gets cut and how to raise money are looming questions. In many states, tax revenues are up from their lowest point but they're still far below pre-recession levels. State tax collections on average are down 12 percent below normal.
Mr. NICK JOHNSON (Director, State Fiscal Project, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities): In most states we are at the point of no easy solutions.
LOHR: Nick Johnson is with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington. He says so far, 40 states have projected budget gaps for the upcoming fiscal year.
Mr. JOHNSON: States by now have drawn down their reserve funds. Theyve made the relatively easy cuts and taken the relatively easy actions. It's at the point of pretty difficult choices in a lot of states.
LOHR: Some states will raise sales or income taxes, others will continue to increase fees on businesses and anything they can think of. Many are promising deeper cuts in state services. That means education, Medicaid reform and pension funds will be among the programs debated again this year.
Some may try to restructure their tax systems. Robert Ward, with the Rockefeller Institute of Government in New York, says state officials need to adopt a long-term economic outlook.
Mr. ROBERT WARD (Deputy Director, Rockefeller Institute): Most of the states emphasized shorter term fixes borrowing, budget gimmicks, failing to make payments to their pension funds those sorts of things can sort of paper over the problem for one year at a time but not only dont solve the long-term problem, they often make it worse.
LOHR: Billions in federal stimulus dollars that went toward education and other state programs are also about to end. And that, too, is putting more pressure on state officials to come up with their own sources of funding.
Among those facing the biggest problems: Illinois, New Jersey, California and Texas. Many felt Texas was recession-proof, but it turns out that low taxes and the stagnant economy have produced a budget gap there as high as $25 billion over the next two years.
And Robert Ward notes several Southern states are struggling, including Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina.
Mr. WARD: The poorer state will be even less able to provide for the neediest. And the long-term solution, obviously, is to try to grow the economy in the poorer regions of our country. And we have been trying to work at that for a long time and we're still struggling to figure out the answers to that one.
LOHR: New Yorks Governor Andrew Cuomo has proposed a one-year freeze on state hiring and salaries, but analysts suggest that won't do much good. They say New York and other states will have to make a lot more tough decisions this year.
Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Atlanta.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
"American Idol" is the most popular show on television program in America, and it's an adaptation of a British show. It's not alone. Plenty of other hits came here from the U.K., including "The Office" and the cable drama "Queer As Folk."
Commentator Andrew Wallenstein has this warning, though, for Hollywood TV executives. Recycling another country's hit shows doesn't always end well.
ANDREW WALLENSTEIN: There's a rich history of shows that succeeded in the U.K. only to get lost in translation on our shores. You may not even remember titles like "Coupling," "Viva Laughlin," "Life On Mars," "Kath & Kim," "The Eleventh Hour." Stop me whenever you'd like.
But all that failure isn't discouraging anyone on this side of the Atlantic. The new CBS reality show "Live To Dance" was derived from the U.K., as was another new Showtime comedy, "Shameless." Next week come two more imports, "Being Human" on Sci-fi and "Skins" on MTV.
(Soundbite of television program, "Skins")
Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As character) I was at a party last weekend, and somebody offered me a marijuana cigarette.
WALLENSTEIN: It's a risque romp about troubled teens, and it was quite controversial in its home country.
(Soundbite of television program, "Skins")
Unidentified Woman #1 (Actor): (As character) Sid's going to be looking after you tonight.
Unidentified Woman #2 (Actor): (As character) Oh, yippee.
Unidentified Man #2 (Actor): (As character) And Sid has got a whole bag of drugs.
Unidentified Woman #2 (Actor): (As character) That's so nice.
WALLENSTEIN: The U.S. has been pulling shows out of London since the '70s, even some bona fide classics like "Sanford & Son," which was first known as "Steptoe & Son."
(Soundbite of television program, "Steptoe & Son")
Unidentified Man #3 (Actor): (As character) If you don't shut up, I shall ram this shuttlecock straight up your carver and set fire to the (unintelligible).
(Soundbite of laughter)
WALLENSTEIN: The reason the U.S. TV business has been looking overseas more in recent years is, as the number of channels multiply, it's harder to find truly fresh material. And as competition intensifies, executives get more risk averse. If a show does well overseas, it seems a safer bet for investing in reproducing it here.
(Soundbite of television program, "Episodes")
Unidentified Man #4 (Actor): (As character) My fantasy is I wake up tomorrow, and I've got your show on my network.
Unidentified Woman #3 (Actor): (As character) Wow, that is very flattering.
WALLENSTEIN: That's a scene from "Episodes," a timely new Showtime comedy about a fictional pair of British TV writers who see their British show adapted and then destroyed by the American TV business.
(Soundbite of television program, "Episodes")
Unidentified Man #5 (Actor): (As character) It could be like "The Office" meets our show?
Unidentified Man #6 (Actor): (As character) Yes.
Unidentified Man #5: (As character) But no farming this one out to some American writers I want what's in these amazing Britishy heads.
Unidentified Woman #4 (Actor): (As character) Us, come to LA?
WALLENSTEIN: Just think about how unconventional something like "The Office" is. Shot as a faux documentary without a laugh track, that's British TV for you. Lots of creative risk-taking. But as a show like "Episodes" satirizes, there's a thin line between risk and ruin.
SIEGEL: Andrew Wallenstein is the senior editor at Paid Content.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, another story from the world of TV. A mega-merger in the realm of fake news, a deal that would be as big as Comcast and NBC, if only Comcast and NBC were funny. The Onion, located in a sidewalk newspaper box near you, and Comedy Central, home to "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," join forces tonight with a fake sports news show.
(Soundbite of television program, "Sportsdome")
Unidentified Man #1: Looks like you can go Dome again. SportsDome is back.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: Rodney Harrison's(ph) written a new book with some major revelations about his time in the league, including the bombshell that throughout his 15-year professional career, he was unaware he was playing a sport.
In "For the Love of Crushing," Harrison writes, quote, I never had any idea I was part of some complicated game. All my life, I enjoyed chasing people and hitting them, especially in the head. If I was able to make them drop anything they might be holding, all the better.
SIEGEL: That's from "SportsDome," and we're joined by Matt Oberg, faux co-anchor of SportsDome. Welcome to the program.
Mr. MATT OBERG ("SportsDome"): Thank you. Thank you very much for having me.
SIEGEL: Major headlines for tonight's show?
Mr. OBERG: There's a lot coming up in this episode. We talk about how the Heat stars, Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade and LeBron, have come up with some new rules for basketball that will make the game a lot more sweeter and cooler. For instance, you will no longer be required to dribble if your dunk is really sweet.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. OBERG: There's a touching story about an MMA fighter who is triumphing despite his disability of having tungsten-alloy metal hands.
St. Louis has given Albert Pujols, in an effort to keep him in a town, a working key to the city, which unlocks every single door in St. Louis.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: Yes, I looked at that one online. He's free to take anything that he wants.
Mr. OBERG: Yes, from their fridges, use their showers, whatever he needs, so long as he'll stick around.
SIEGEL: Now you are joining this powerhouse line-up. You'll be the lead-in to "The Daily Show," which is then followed by "The Colbert Report." High pressure, eh?
Mr. OBERG: Well, you know, I think historically, if you look back, there's not a whole lot of Peabodies that have been won by the shows preceding "The Daily Show." I don't know if "Crank Yankers" ever had - was ever really celebrated by any academy. But we just hope, you know, people find us funny enough not to change the channel right before.
SIEGEL: Now, "The Colbert Report," excuse me, "The Colbert Report," is a take, is a comic take on I guess "The O'Reilly Factor" primarily, and here we're, essentially we're talking about ESPN "SportsCenter" is what we're - that's the text you're working off here, huh?
Mr. OBERG: Agreed. That is what we're basing our show off of. But, whereas "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report" are sort of bound to reality, we have the luxury of just lying and making things up out of whole cloth.
So we don't need to react to what happened today or this week. We can make up a future and a present that suits our jokes' needs. So...
SIEGEL: And just as "SportsCenter," every show, I think, has the top 10 plays, you have a top 10.
Mr. OBERG: There's several top 10s. I think maybe the one you're talking about is the top 10 Stans in sports' history.
(Soundbite of television program, "SportsDome")
Unidentified Man #2: Number seven is Stanislov Joyce(ph).
Unidentified Man #3: Brother of Irish write James Joyce, who was a mentor to Nobel Prize-winner Samuel Beckett, who was a talented cricket player.
Unidentified Man #2: Who's the boss? Stanislov.
Unidentified Man #3: Stan O'Niel(ph) is six.
Unidentified Man #2: Tennis prodigy in his teens, active in a whole new game now, clinical anesthesiologist.
Unidentified Man #3: Happy for him.
Unidentified Man #2: But (unintelligible).
Unidentified Man #3: I hate that thing.
Unidentified Man #2: Come on...
Mr. OBERG: At number one is Ben Roethlisberger, who is not named Stan but has the letters in his name to spell it out, and he's a truck, so he's got to be on the list.
SIEGEL: Plus a lot of other letters, too, in there.
Mr. OBERG: Yes, yes.
SIEGEL: Now, your character's name on the program is Mark Shepard. Stephen Colbert gets to use his own name. Jon Stewart gets to use his first name and his middle name, not his last name. Why a stage name for your character? Why does your colleague, Matthew Walton go by the name Alex Reiser or Reiser on the show?
Mr. OBERG: Reiser, yeah. Well, I think probably because we're acting a little bit. I mean, we're not, you know, claiming to be these people. It's a performance we're doing. And I think there are things, particularly in Matt Walton's Alex Reiser character, that he would not want people to actually think were happening in his real life.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. OBERG: He's had some trouble with some interns at the network, but he's back from a suspension. He's real into beach volleyball coverage, and I don't think my good friend Matt Walton would want his friends and family thinking that that was true about him.
SIEGEL: I see. So it's for cover that you have fictional names is what you're saying.
Mr. OBERG: Exactly, exactly. None of this can hold up in court that way.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: Well, good luck to you, with the lying on the program that begins this evening on Comedy Central.
Mr. OBERG: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That is Matt Oberg, who is the co-anchor of "SportsDome," making its debut this evening. Thanks for talking with us.
Mr. OBERG: Thanks a lot. First time, long time.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
It's the latest salvo - and a big one - in the ongoing smart phone war. Verizon Wireless said today that it will begin selling its much anticipated version of the iPhone next month.
Until now, AT&T has been the exclusive distributor of the popular smart phone. The launch promises to intensify the competition between the country's largest wireless carriers.
NPR's Jim Zarroli reports.
JIM ZARROLI: As if to underscore the fact that this was no mere product launch, Verizon unveiled its new iPhone at a rented theater inside that citadel of the arts, Lincoln Center.
On stage, executives from Apple and Verizon ladled on the superlatives. This was a tremendous, exciting, game-changer of an event. It would transform the smart phone world. Here was Verizon Wireless chief executive officer Dan Mead.
Mr. DAN MEAD (Verizon Wireless): Now, wireless consumers everywhere have a choice - a choice they've never had before: the revolutionary iPhone 4 on the nation's most reliable network.
ZARROLI: The new iPhone will be sold in Verizon and Apple stores starting February 10th, and some wireless customers will be able to buy it online a week earlier. The price will start at $200 for customers who sign a two-year contract, but executives wouldn't talk about pricing for monthly service plans or how many phones will be manufactured. The Verizon iPhone will operate on the company's 3G network, which is older and slower than the 4G network.
Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook says the companies could have waited until 4G was further along, but Cook says the companies were eager to oblige their customers.
Mr. TIM COOK (Chief Operating Officer, Apple): The most popular question has been: When will the iPhone work on the Verizon network? And we wanted to provide people that choice now.
ZARROLI: As it is, there are some things you won't be able to do on the Verizon iPhone that you can do on its competitor, says analyst Charles Golvin of Forrester Research.
Mr. CHARLES GOLVIN (Analyst, Forrester Research): Using your phone, you can make a phone call and you can browse the Web, but you cannot do these two things simultaneously. And on the AT&T network, you can.
ZARROLI: There have also been questions about whether Verizon's network can handle millions of new voice and data customers without degrading service. Verizon says it has invested heavily in strengthening its network during the past year. Verizon is also hoping that its reputation for more reliable service will lure customers away from AT&T.
In Tampa today, Rebecca O'Dell(ph) said her AT&T phone sometimes has poor reception, and she likes the idea of Verizon offering its own iPhone.
Ms. REBECCA O'DELL: I definitely decided that it gives me another option for plans because I'm concerned about the reception plan with AT&T. There seems to be some pockets, so I just like that idea that there's a choice now.
ZARROLI: But AT&T has something else going for it, a lot of its customers can't sever their service without incurring penalties.
Eric Sunday(ph) is an iPhone user, and he says he considers switching to Verizon just not now.
Mr. ERIC SUNDAY: I'm under contract on one of my phones. You know, we have a family plan. So I really have to wait until my other phone goes out of contract before I could really consider making a switch.
ZARROLI: Still Verizon has some 93 million wireless customers. Many of them have wanted to buy iPhones before now but didn't want to switch carriers. Starting next month, they'll have a chance to buy iPhones for the first time, and Verizon thinks it can persuade a lot of them to do so.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Automakers from around the world are showing off their latest creations at the annual North American International Auto Show in Detroit this week.
After sluggish sales for the past two years, the industry is hoping to rev up consumer interest by unveiling some three dozen new cars and trucks. Five thousand journalists have poured into the Cobo Center over the past two days for a sneak peek, and one of them is Dan Neil, automotive critic for The Wall Street Journal. And he joins us now to give us some headlines on the show so far.
Hi, Dan. Welcome back.
Mr. DAN NEIL (Automotive Columnist, The Wall Street Journal): Hey. How are you, Robert?
SIEGEL: And let's start with the car that you've been very enthusiastic about: the Volt. It was named Car of the Year yesterday.
Mr. NEIL: Yes, it was, and GM was very excited about it. They even compared it to the moon shot, which is a little bit of marketing hyperbole, but we'll, you know, we'll accept it, given the tenor of the moment. They also said that they might increase production of this vehicle to something like 60,000 vehicles a year, which is a very, very big number. And other manufacturers are following suit.
SIEGEL: Another - a new idea, it seems, on display in Detroit is the Toyota Prius wagon.
Mr. NEIL: Yeah. That's right. You know, Toyota has had this problem, and it's a good problem to have. Prius and hybrid have become more or less similar in the American mind. And, you know, the Prius is an undercapitalized brand, and so they're broadening the brand with something called the Prius V, which is kind of a hatch-wagon version of the Prius, and they're also going to have a little sporty Prius. And it's basically being broken out into a separate car line.
SIEGEL: Do these new Priuses or Prii - I don't know which word the plural is - do they have the same kind of mileage, the same efficiency as the original Prius?
Mr. NEIL: Well, it's interesting. First of all, the whole campaign they've put out here is what do you call two Priuses? Is it Prii? They've settled, I think, on Prium, and I thought he was the king of Troy.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. NEIL: Anyway - but moving on, the bigger wagon doesn't have quite the 50-mile-per-gallon efficiency that the other one does, but it gets pretty good gas mileage and - but I tell you. All across the board on this show, if you're not getting 40 miles per gallon, you're a gas guzzler.
The powertrain stories here are remarkable. You know, full-sized Audis are, you know, touting 42 miles per gallon. Ford is building big, you know, big people movers that get 40 miles per gallon. That's become sort of the new black.
(Soundbite of laughter)
SIEGEL: What are you seeing from the Korean carmakers?
Mr. NEIL: Well, Hyundai and Kia have had huge years. Hyundai sales have been up 24 percent in 2010. They've got a slew of new product. Their prices and their content are fantastic, and their quality is good. Their safety is five by five. The Koreans are going to be very, very tough competitors in this market, and it kind of - it looks like they'll steal a march on Volkswagen who has declared their intention to be the biggest volume seller in the U.S. with 800,000 unit sales by 2018.
SIEGEL: Now, do GM, Ford and Chrysler - now, of course, is owned by Fiat - are they presenting this as the auto show of a recovery year? Or are they more modest in their hopes of what's going to happen with car sales this year?
Mr. NEIL: Well, I think the great thing about getting beaten up is it feels so good when it stops. So the sense of relief is palpable.
You know, this past year, 2010, annual sales were 11.6 million vehicles in the U.S. That's still the second worst year in three decades. The worst, obviously, was 2009. So the economy and the market is a long way from recovering, but the one thing that's interesting is that every one here, all the manufacturers, all the engineers, all the executives, are anticipating that fuel prices are going to go beyond $4 a gallon.
And in the past, they've dealt with this, you know, sort of inevitability with denial. This time, they feel that they are really ready with the products in hand, and so the timing seems to be auspicious. And I think that's one of the things that's driving the optimism. It's the sense that finally the market and the price of oil are in some kind of sync.
SIEGEL: Dan Neil, who writes about cars for The Wall Street Journal, talking to us from the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.
Thank you, Dan.
Mr. NEIL: All right. Thanks.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona remains in critical condition today. Doctors say she is alert, responsive and capable of breathing on her own. But they are leaving in a breathing tube to prevent complications such as pneumonia.
Those details came in a news conference at the University of Arizona Medical Center, where friends and family of some of Saturday's other victims spoke to reporters. As NPR's Richard Gonzales reports, the hospital has become a gathering place for the community.
RICHARD GONZALES: In front of the impromptu memorial at the University Medical Center, a local mariachi band belted out a ballad of sadness and longing.
(Soundbite of music)
GONZALES: Violinist Arispa Ellenwood said her band, Mariachi Aritzlan, had played once before for Congresswoman Giffords. She said the band hoped music would help heal the pain felt everywhere in Tucson.
Ms. ARISPA ELLENWOOD (Musician): I think it's really horrible when people do stuff like that. It was actually really scary. You want people to feel open and comfortable to talk to congresspeople or just anyone in an open space, and you don't want to feel, like, threatened or feel scared to do stuff like that.
GONZALES: Inside, doctors talked of their cautious optimism about Congresswoman Giffords' condition. There's been no increase in the swelling of her brain. But her neurosurgeon, Dr. Michael Lemole, said that her recovery will proceed on her timeline, not ours.
Dr. MICHAEL LEMOLE (Neurosurgeon, University Medical Center): She's going to take her recovery at her own pace. And I'm very encouraged by the fact that she has done so well. A penetrating injury to the skull, the survival, let alone recovery, is abysmal. She has no right to look this good, and she does.
GONZALES: The families of other victims were taking their own time in healing as well. The parents of nine-year-old Christina Green, the youngster killed in the attack, were not there. Christina was at the mall with her neighbor, Susan Heilman, who was among the victims. Susan is now recovering, says her husband, Bill.
Mr. BILL HEILMAN: Susie had her breathing tube removed late Saturday evening, and she looked me in the eyes and said: What about Christina? We were advised that the exact right thing to do, which coincides with 40 years of knowing her and knowing there's no other right way to deal with her, was to tell her the exact truth, which we've done.
She's only kind of coming out of all this very slowly, and I don't know for sure all of what has truly been absorbed at this point.
GONZALES: A memorial service for Christina Green is scheduled for Wednesday. Tucson is also preparing for the arrival of President Barack Obama tomorrow. People planning to attend the event are being advised to expect higher-than-usual security.
Richard Gonzales, NPR News, Tucson.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Since Saturday, much has been made of the relationship between heated political rhetoric and actual, physical violence. It's a conversation that began long before this weekend's tragic events, but it resurged on Saturday, due in part to the comments of Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik.
Sheriff CLARENCE DUPNIK (Pima County, Arizona): The rhetoric about hatred, about mistrust of government, about paranoia of how government operates, has impact on people, especially who are unbalanced personalities to begin with.
SIEGEL: And we heard much the same argument yesterday on this program in my interview with House Assistant Democratic Leader James Clyburn.
Representative JAMES CLYBURN (Democrat, South Carolina): People hear things and feel that they can make a martyr out of themselves. Because of the discourse around the political arena, they sometimes react with ways that are socially unacceptable. But that does not absolve us.
SIEGEL: But there is an equally passionate refrain coming largely from conservatives, but not exclusively, that this kind of talk is: A, premature, given how little we know about Jared Loughner's motives; and that B, it is an affront to free speech.
I'm joined now by former Republican Congressman John Shaddeg of Arizona, who is joining us actually from Penn Station in New York. Welcome to the program.
Mr. JOHN SHADEGG (Former Republican Representative, Arizona): Glad to be with you.
SIEGEL: And what do you make of the argument we just heard from Sheriff Dupnik, Congressman Clyburn, that heated political rhetoric can be downright dangerous, it can make people do violent things?
Mr. SHADEGG: Quite frankly, I think it's natural to expect some people to make that argument, but I believe it is, in fact, as you suggested, somewhat immature, and I think it does not excuse the individual involved.
I think you have to examine the entire political culture. I can make an argument that the frustration of this individual resulted from the Congress, quite frankly, not listening to the people over the last two years and, for example, passing very, very major legislation when a majority of Americans opposed it.
So are those who did that willing to take some blame for the reaction of or the impact on an unbalanced person or someone that is deranged, such as this shooter?
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm. But going back to actual rhetoric and to the ways in which people make their arguments, are there some comments, let's take for example Sharron Angle, the Nevada Senate candidate, who said in her campaign against Majority Leader Harry Reid that Americans angry with the state or the government might, at some point, resort to what she called Second Amendment remedies. She was widely criticized for that. Is that sort of thing beyond the pale, as far as you're concerned? Should leaders be saying don't talk that way?
Mr. SHADEGG: Certainly there are comments that are beyond the pale. I don't think I want to comment on that specific one or any other specific one. But I think politicians should be cautious in their rhetoric. I think they should try to be civil.
Congresswoman Giffords, because she was from my home state and in my delegation, was always civil and cheerful and upbeat when we talked, even when we disagreed philosophically.
But that raises the question not just of politicians, but what about of political commentators? What about the TV news shows where hype or excessive rhetoric is not only tolerated but in fact perhaps encouraged in order to get viewership?
Extreme rhetoric by politicians or the encouragement of extreme rhetoric by figures in the news media does not serve the nation well.
SIEGEL: But typically, people regard their opponents' rhetoric as extreme and their own as, you know, perhaps a bit strong but justified. You use the phrase to describe the Democrats' health care bill as full of Russian gulag, Soviet-style gulag health care. I mean, I think those of us who have read some Solzhenitsyn, I think you might concede that wasn't a literal comment that you were making. Perhaps it was, but over the top, possibly, a little extreme?
Mr. SHADEGG: Sure. It seems to me that sometimes you make a point, and you try to make it with emphasis, and perhaps you get carried away. I think we're all prone to that.
And I think that if one of the lessons we can draw from this senseless shooting and the senseless deaths that occurred is that we need to ratchet back that rhetoric and focus more on arguments, on the merits. Name-calling really doesn't accomplish anything. That would be a good thing to come out of this incident.
SIEGEL: So perhaps the discussion, even if you don't agree with what it's implying about who's responsible for what, not an unhealthy discussion, I hear you saying.
Mr. SHADEGG: Well, yeah. I think over-the-top rhetoric engaged in by any politicians, right or left, is just that, over the top. And I think this is a call for us to strive toward greater civility in all of our dialogue.
SIEGEL: Well, former Congressman John Shadegg, thank you very much for talking with us today.
Mr. SHADEGG: My pleasure.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
Algeria and Tunisia are often cited as two of the Arab world's most stable countries. They share a border in the Maghreb or North Africa, and they're ruled by secular, authoritarian governments. But both Algeria and Tunisia are beginning the New Year engulfed in an unprecedented wave of riots and fatal clashes between protesters and police.
Yesterday, the Tunisian president ordered all universities and schools closed indefinitely. Algeria suspended some professional soccer games where crowds might form.
To talk about the roots of the violence and what it means for the region, we're joined now by Chloe Arnold, who covers North Africa for the BBC. She joins us from the Algerian capital, Algiers.
Welcome to the program.
Ms. CHLOE ARNOLD (Correspondent, BBC): Thank you.
SIEGEL: And first, Algeria, what sparked the violence there?
Ms. ARNOLD: In Algeria, the violence was sparked by price hikes at the beginning of the year for staple foods. And the prices went up by between 20 and 50 percent, but had a knock-on effect on other foods that are made with these products.
Now, what the government has said now - in order to appease the protestors - is that they will reduce the import duties and taxes on these foods. So those prices are coming down.
SIEGEL: Those price increases, you say are what sparked violence in Algeria, where you're speaking to us from. In neighboring Tunisia, what got the riots going?
Ms. ARNOLD: They were triggered by a young man, a university graduate who had not been able to find any work at all - any employment, except for selling fruit and vegetables in his local market. Well, it turned out he wasn't even allowed to do that. Police came down on him pretty heavy-handedly, confiscated his produce because they said he was selling them without a proper permit.
He, in retaliation - I suppose, if you like - set himself alight, killing himself. And this triggered enormous protests across the country.
SIEGEL: Which strikes you more, Chloe Arnold, what's similar about what's happening in these two North African countries or what's different?
Ms. ARNOLD: I think it would be dangerous to draw too many parallels. What you can say, I think, is that there are similar demographics an enormous number of young people, a vast percentage of the population is under 30 in both countries, and not a lot going on. There's even a word for it in Algeria. And I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly, it's hittiste from the word hit, which means wall in Arabic.
And it literally describes the people who stand, leaning against walls all day long, smoking cigarettes, kicking their heels because they are bored. There's nothing to do. There are no jobs. And that is similar in both countries.
SIEGEL: And one last point. The response of each government to these riots, has it been similar in Algeria and Tunisia?
Ms. ARNOLD: They've been a little different. The Algerian government responded pretty quickly. Within a week, they have had said that they would bring down the prices of staple foods - that's sugar and cooking oil. And so the immediate cause of those riots was resolved, if you like. And people have come off the streets now. The riots in Algeria seemed to have subsided.
In Tunisia, it's a different picture. There are still riots going on. The army has been brought in to try to quell the violence. And the Tunisian president has really come down pretty hard, blaming foreign parties, he says - blaming a small group of violent extremists for organizing the riots.
Of course, you need to remember that these are unprecedented riots in Tunisia. In 23 years of rule, President Ben Ali has never seen anything like this. It's the biggest threat to his presidency he's ever seen.
SIEGEL: Chloe Arnold of the BBC in Algiers, thanks for talking with us.
Ms. ARNOLD: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Baghdad, ever since the brutal sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007, the city has been a collection of enclaves. For the most part, Shiites live with Shiites and Sunnis live with Sunnis.
As NPR's Kelly McEvers reports, many of those who fled their neighborhoods are now caught in limbo.
KELLY McEVERS: You hear a lot of sad stories in Iraq. Some people cry. Some people yell. Some people just hang their heads and try to get it together. That's what Mortada Mohammad Rasul did when he told us what happened to his brother and to his house.
Mr. MORTADA MOHAMMAD RASUL: (Foreign language spoken)
McEVERS: It was 40 years ago when Rasul's family bought the house. His grandfather, a baker and a barber, borrowed the equivalent of $16,000 for eight bedrooms and a big garden on a main street.
Mr. RASUL: (Foreign language spoken)
McEVERS: It was a good neighborhood, Rasul says, a mixed neighborhood. For decades, his Shiite family thought nothing of the fact that their neighbors were Sunnis, until 2006, when Sunni extremists took over and the neighbors kidnapped Rasul's brother.
Mr. RASUL: (Through translator) When I got the news that my brother was kidnapped, immediately, I called my family and I told them: Leave the house immediately.
McEVERS: The kidnappers contacted Rasul by phone and demanded a ransom. Then, Rasul believes, his brother was sold to another group. Negotiations ended. Three days later, Rasul found his brother in the morgue. Since that day, Rasul has spent only a handful of nights at his family house.
(Soundbite of conversation)
McEVERS: Instead, he couch-surfs; sometimes sleeping here - on the floor of his older brother's house - sometimes crashing with friends.
With no job, he can't afford to rent a new house and no one in his now exclusively Sunni neighborhood will buy his old house. Potential buyers know he's desperate, that he'll never live there again. They're just waiting for him to drop the price to almost nothing.
Mr. RASUL: (Through translator) It's only the house that we have. If we lose it, it means we're done. We're over.
McEVERS: This is the dilemma of hundreds of thousands of Baghdad families who were forced to flee during the sectarian war: The value of the old house is going down, but rents are going up. That means the family's worth is disappearing.
Pollster and sociologist Ahmed Qassim says more than half of the city's displaced families once identified themselves as upper or middle class. But 82 percent of a recent sampling of displaced Baghdadis said they were barely making ends meet.
Qassim says one portion of Baghdad's middle class is withering away, while another one - the newly formed political class - is taking its place.
Mr. AHMED QASSIM (Sociologist): (Through translator) What happened here, the change that took place here has shaken the carpet. Those who were up went down. And those who were down, they went up.
McEVERS: But the losers are still losers, and they're both Shiite and Sunni. The Iraqi government does occasionally give displaced families cash stipends of a few hundred dollars. Most say that's not enough.
Abdul-Khaliq Zangana for years headed the Iraqi parliament's Displacement Committee. He says the issue simply is not a priority.
Mr. ABDUL-KHALIQ ZANGANA (Member of Parliament): (Through translator) The majority of those who were displaced, they were anti-government, they were not supporting the government, they were not pro-government.
McEVERS: So, the official thinking goes, why should the government help them?
The sad reality is that after a civil war, property is rarely given back. Scholars say it takes generations for people to begin the process of reclaiming what's theirs, if that happens at all.
Ibrahim Ismail Ibrahim doesn't have that kind of time. His grandfather was a Sunni cleric who scrimped and saved to build a house back in the '60s. Then his father sold the house and loaned Ibrahim the money to build his own.
Mr. IBRAHIM ISMAIL IBRAHIM: (Foreign language spoken)
McEVERS: Ibrahim never had the chance to pay the money back. In 2007, his father and three brothers were killed by a man he believes was linked to a Shiite militia. Ibrahim fled the house.
He now rents a house for his mother, his wife and his five children. But Ibrahim is running out of money and his mother is ill.
So why not just sell the house and get the money, and take care of her?
Mr. IBRAHIM: (Through translator) Actually, it's her - my mother. She's the one who is telling me don't ever sell the house. Because the problem is that if you sell the house, you now lose everything.
MCEVERS: If you don't own a house, she keeps telling him, you don't have a country. When all else fails, she says, you have to have somewhere to go.
Kelly McEvers, NPR News, Baghdad.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
How do you think life, as we know it, will end? Nuclear war? Climate change? How about an out-of-control computer?
(Soundbite of movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey")
Mr. DOUGLAS RAIN (Actor): (as HAL 9000) I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal.
SIEGEL: That, of course, is HAL 9000 from Stanley Kubrick's science fiction masterpiece "2001: A Space Odyssey."
Well, in 2011, some people think we're getting closer to inventing an artificial intelligence that could figure out how to make itself smarter. If so, they say, it might be the last thing humans ever invent.
NPR's Martin Kaste has the story.
MARTIN KASTE: There's an apartment in downtown Berkeley where they're trying to save the world.
(Soundbite of knocking)
KASTE: Hello.
It's four apartments, actually, which have been rented by something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
Mr. KEEFE ROEDERSHEIMER (Software Engineer, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence): Hi, how is it going?
KASTE: Good. Thank you.
Mr. ROEDERSHEIMER: Can I offer you guys some tea?
KASTE: Keefe Roedersheimer is one of the institute's research fellows. Over cups of green tea, he explains that he's a software engineer who's done work for NASA, and that his idea of a good time is teaching a computer how to play poker like a human.
But right now, at the institute, he's trying to predict the rate of advancement of artificial intelligence or A.I.
Mr. ROEDERSHEIMER: So it's about knowing when this could happen.
KASTE: By this, he's talking about the invention of a computer that's not only smart but also capable of improving itself.
Mr. ROEDERSHEIMER: Is able to look at its own source code and say, ah, if I change this, I'm going to get smarter. And then by getting smarter, it sees new insights into how to get smarter. And then by having those insights into how to get smarter, it modifies its source code and gets smarter and gets some insights. And that creates an extraordinarily intelligent thing.
KASTE: They call this the A.I. singularity. Because the intelligence could grow so fast, human minds might not be able to keep up. And therein lies the danger.
You've already seen this movie.
(Soundbite of movie, "Terminator 2: Judgment Day")
Mr. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (Actor): (as The Terminator) Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
Ms. LINDA HAMILTON (Actress): (as Sarah Connor) Skynet fights back.
Mr. SCHWARZENEGGER: (as The Terminator) Yes.
KASTE: They kind of hate it at the institute when you quote the "Terminator," but Roedersheimer says, at least, those movies gave people a sense of what could happen.
Mr. ROEDERSHEIMER: That's an A.I. that could get out of control. But if you really think about it, it's much worse than that.
KASTE: Much worse than "Terminator"?
Mr. ROEDERSHEIMER: Much, much worse.
KASTE: How could it possibly - that's a moonscape with people hiding under burnt out buildings and being shot by laser. I mean, what could be worse than that?
Mr. ROEDERSHEIMER: All the people are dead.
KASTE: In other words, forget the heroic human resistance. There'd be no time to organize one. Somebody presses enter, and we're done.
The singularity idea has floated around the edges of computer science since the 1960s, but these days, it's the subject of Silicon Valley philanthropy.
At a fund-raising party in San Francisco, the co-founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, explains why he supports the Singularity Institute.
Mr. PETER THIEL (Co-Founder, PayPal): People are not worried about what supersmart computers will do to change the world, because we don't see those every day. And so I suspect that there are a lot of these issues that are being underestimated.
KASTE: Also at the party is Eliezer Yudkowsky, the 31-year-old who co-founded the institute. He's here to mingle with potential new donors. As far as he's concerned, preparing for the singularity takes primacy over other charitable causes.
Mr. ELIEZER YUDKOWSKY (Research Fellow and Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence): If you want to maximize your expected utility, you try to save the world and the future of intergalactic civilization instead of donating your money to the society for curing rare diseases and cute puppies.
KASTE: Yudkowsky doesn't have formal training in computer science, but his writings have a following among some who do. He says he's not predicting that the future super A.I. will necessarily hate humans. It's more likely, he says, that it'll be indifferent to us - but that's not much better.
Mr. YUDKOWSKY: While it may not hate you, you're made of atoms that it can use for something else. So it's probably not a good thing to build that particular kind of A.I.
KASTE: What he and the institute are trying to do, he says, is start the process of figuring out how to build what he calls friendly A.I. before somebody inevitably builds the unfriendly variety.
But that day still seems a long way off when you look at the current state of A.I.
Good morning. Hello?
Unidentified Female: Are you looking for Eric?
KASTE: A computerized receptionist guards the office of Microsoft distinguished scientist Eric Horvitz.
Unidentified Female: Eric is working on something now. I think he won't mind too much, though, if you interrupt him. Would you like to go in?
KASTE: Horvitz is past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. He's working on systems that can greet visitors, do basic medical diagnoses and even read human body language.
Mr. ERIC HORVITZ: One whole direction we're going in is to bring together machine vision, machine learning, conversational abilities to explore what we call integrative A.I. And this is one path to brighter intelligences some day.
KASTE: But Horvitz doubts that one of these virtual receptionists could ever lead to something that takes over the world. He says that's like expecting a kite to evolve into a 747 on its own.
So does that mean he thinks the singularity is ridiculous?
Mr. HORVITZ: Well, no. I think there's been a mix of views, and I have to say that I have mixed feelings myself.
KASTE: In part because of ideas like the singularity, Horvitz and other A.I. scientists have been doing more to look at some of the ethical issues that might arise over the next few years with narrow A.I. systems.
They've also been asking themselves some more futuristic questions. For instance, how would you go about designing an emergency off switch for a computer that can redesign itself?
Mr. HORVITZ: I do think that the stakes are high enough where even if there was a low, small chance of some of these kinds of scenarios, that it's worth investing time and effort to be proactive.
KASTE: Still, many see the Singularity Institute and like-minded organizations as fringe. One computer scientist let slip the word cultish; others mock the singularity as the rapture of the nerds.
At the institute, they shrug this off. As far as they're concerned, it's just a matter of being rational about the future - relentlessly rational.
Jasen Murray, for instance, says he has no illusions about the institute's ability to succeed at its mission.
Mr. JASEN MURRAY (Program Manager, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence): We have between 30 and 60 years to figure out this - to solve this ridiculously hard problem that we probably have a low chance of solving correctly and - ah, this is just really bad.
KASTE: But they're willing to try. The institute is looking to move out of its apartments in Berkeley and buy a big old Victorian house. That way, its researchers can have a more permanent home for whatever time humanity has left.
Martin Kaste, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Author Mishna Wolff fell in love with the book because of the harshness of its characters' lives. Here she is to explain why you must read this.
MISHNA WOLFF: But surprisingly, it feels life-affirming, as though that thing that makes them try is some basic life force that cannot be killed no matter how depraved an environment it lives in - the will to survive. And there is something inspiring about their courage - to stand for themselves in this cruel neighborhood and say, I'm here, this is me, I am here.
SIEGEL: Mishna Wolff's latest book is called, "I'm Down, a Memoir." She picked "Last Exit to Brooklyn" by Hubert Selby, Jr. for our series You Must Read This.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Jeff Brady has that story.
JEFF BRADY: John Hickenlooper came into politics after a successful run in the restaurant business. Today, his public image is just about as amusing as his name. His political ads get much of the credit for that. Here he is in mid-air, skydiving in 2005 for a tax reform measure.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
G: It means that money for important things like education, transportation and health care keep falling and falling...
BRADY: And this past election, when the airwaves were packed with attack ads, Hickenlooper was shown jumping in and out of a shower fully clothed.
(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD)
G: I guess I'm not a very good politician, 'cause I can't stand negative ads. Every time I see one, I feel like I need to take a shower.
BRADY: Hickenlooper could afford to take a risk with his ads because his two conservative opponents split the vote on the other side, giving him an easy win. But Hickenlooper's image and his style of governing could become important as state leaders tackle Colorado's looming budget gap.
P: He has a bit of a, gosh, gee whiz persona.
BRADY: John Straayer is a political science professor at Colorado State University.
P: I think he has a little bit of the Teflon that Ronald Reagan enjoyed, things sort of slide off of him. And I think that's largely because he's very affable, very pleasant person, slow to anger. And I think that makes him particularly effective.
BRADY: As a Democrat, he also faces a reinvigorated Republican opposition. The GOP took control in November of the lower House in the state general assembly. The new speaker is Frank McNulty, a conservative who talks about making government live within its means.
NORRIS: The savings account is gone. The rich uncle that has been giving us money is not there anymore. And so, those other things that have helped us kind of coast along aren't there anymore. And so, the circumstances dictate a much higher level of belt tightening than they have even in the past.
BRADY: When asked his strategy for dealing with the difficult negotiations ahead, Hickenlooper essentially says to be a nice guy, then he relates a story from his childhood.
G: My dad died when I was a kid. And I had a year in elementary school where everybody hated me. And I just kind of shut off my mouth. And I was just trying to make people like me, but I did all the wrong things.
BRADY: Hickenlooper says his mother created a chart. And every day, when he got home from school, she asked him things like whether he'd said anything mean behind someone's back or been disrespectful.
G: You know, all these things I'd get either a gold star, a silver star or a red star. And it made me think about how you relate with people and what it is that aggravates them.
BRADY: So Hickenlooper says he'll spend a lot of time listening to people, trying to figure out what they really want.
G: And try to find where is that sweet spot where, perhaps, no one's perfectly happy but everyone gets - they feel that they've gotten most of what they really need.
BRADY: Jeff Brady, NPR News, Denver.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Susan Bence of member station WUWM in Milwaukee visited the lab and has this tour for us.
SUSAN BENCE: Wright, a former marine mammal pathologist, sets a brisk pace as we walk down the hallway.
SCOTT WRIGHT: These are offices for folks on our field investigation team and different scientists have their offices up here.
BENCE: The center deals primarily with dead creatures in an attempt to figure out what went wrong in the wild.
WRIGHT: We have sea otters. That's probably the one marine mammal we work the most with. We have staff here that were on the field, on the ground when Exxon Valdez occurred. They were out there conducting necropsies on all sorts of things.
BENCE: But most cases, well, actually, carcasses, from around the country are shipped to their door. To make that happen, Wright says its investigators head out to visit people in the field.
WRIGHT: State wildlife management agents, biologists in different states, federal, tribal that are responsible for managing wildlife. Most of these events that occur, occur in very rural, remote locations where these folks work. And so they know to call us and say, hey, I've got this die-off, can you please help?
(SOUNDBITE OF FOOTSTEPS)
BENCE: Below ground is the necropsy lab where they do the animal version of an autopsy. Inside the lab, pathologist Dr. David Green is on duty.
WRIGHT: He's working on some intestines right now. I don't know what it's from 'cause he threw away the carcass.
BENCE: So, Dr. Green works exclusively with bird issues?
WRIGHT: No. He spent a great deal of his professional time focusing on amphibian diseases.
BENCE: Nobody, not even Scott Wright, is allowed inside this necropsy suite, or any of the labs for that matter. Spectators have to stand behind thick windows.
WRIGHT: He's collecting samples. He will put it in special containers that go to a dumbwaiter that goes upstairs to the diagnostic lab. And then when they get to the diagnostic lab, we maintain the integrity of the sample.
BENCE: Later in the lab library, we meet Dr. Green. He's sporting an impressively groomed handlebar mustache and exudes professional contentment.
DAVID GREEN: The diversity is just incredible. I still vividly remember the first time I was asked to dissect a pelican.
BENCE: For NPR News, I'm Susan Bence in Milwaukee.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
We're going to the beach now and not just to any beach, this one is cold, but popular and crowded with a few thousand penguins.
(SOUNDBITE OF PENGUINS)
SIEGEL: It's a beach in Argentina. Every year around this time, penguins congregate in the far Southern Hemisphere to build nests and raise families. There are plenty of biologists on hand, too, wrapping tags on the penguins' flippers so they can follow the birds for life.
NPR: swimming.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: Rory Wilson has watched penguins for 30 years.
RORY WILSON: Even people that work on penguins don't appreciate how stunning they are underwater, how maneuverable and how fast. You know, they're just - it's hard to describe it.
JOYCE: Wilson and other scientists have shown that penguins have a very, very low coefficient of drag. That's a measure of how well a body moves through air or water.
WILSON: If you were shaped like a penguin, you could kick off the side of a swimming pool and you would just go, you know, gliding for yards and yards and yards.
JOYCE: But Wilson and other biologists say some tags seemed to increase drag and slow down penguins. These tags can be plastic, aluminum or other metal. They're usually about an inch wide and a few inches long and wrap around the narrow base of a flipper. It's hard to imagine they'd slow down a penguin. Wilson, from Swansea University in Great Britain, says they do.
WILSON: Think of it like this: If you had a speedboat or something and then you took one of your bands and you stuck it to a propeller, would you expect the boat to perform in the same way?
JOYCE: Yvon Le Maho was the chief biologist.
YVON LE MAHO: In other words, only the super athletes are surviving.
JOYCE: Yvon Le Maho found that banded birds took longer to forage for food in the ocean and they were slower to get to breeding sites in the spring. So adults had less time to raise their chicks before heading off for lengthy foraging trips in the winter.
LE MAHO: At some times, they will have to leave while their chick is still too young and too poor in body fuels of reserves to withstand the winter.
JOYCE: The study appears in the journal Nature, but the verdict on tags is by no means clear. Other scientists say they've got different results. Among the world's leading penguin experts is Dee Boersma, at the University of Washington.
DEE BOERSMA: This study shows that the bands that they used on King penguins harmed the King penguins. I have no doubt about that. But all bands are not created equal. It depends on what material that they're made of, it depends on how they're shaped, it depends on how they're fitted to the individual penguin. It depends on what penguin species it is.
JOYCE: Boersma has also studied bands on Magellanic penguins. Aluminum bands were harmful, but stainless steel ones were fine. She says eliminating all tags would be throwing the baby out with the bath water.
BOERSMA: In almost all cases, whenever we do science, we would like to do no harm. But in fact we do have to do some harm if we want to follow individuals.
JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Daniel Hernandez has emerged from the tragedy a hero. He was a new intern who rushed to the aid of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords after she'd been shot.
M: The first thing I did was to pick her up and prop her up against my chest to make sure that she could breathe properly. Once I was sure that she was able to breathe properly and wouldn't asphyxiate, the next thing I did was to apply pressure to her wounds to make sure that we could stem the blood loss.
SIEGEL: Writer Daisy Hernandez, no relation to Daniel Hernandez, has this reflection.
M: I wasn't the only person on Saturday who rushed to her Android when news came of the Tucson shooting. I wasn't looking, however, to read about what had happened. My auntie had already filled me in - someone tried to murder una representante. People have been killed, she reported. What I wanted to know was the killer's surname.
M: It's painfully ironic that a gay Latino man came to the aid of Representative Giffords in the storm of gunfire. If a judge hadn't blocked provisions of Arizona's SB 1070 law, however, the intern's surname would have easily qualified him as a target for police under different circumstances on Saturday.
A: I admit that it was only after I saw the shooter's gringo surname that I was able to go on and read the rest of the news about those who lost their lives on Saturday and those who, like Representative Giffords, were severely wounded. I admit also that I felt some small relief in knowing that at least this shooting wouldn't be used as a reason for yet another backlash against immigrants, or at least that's what I'm hoping. In this political climate, it's hard to tell.
SIEGEL: Daisy Hernandez is the co-editor of "Colonize This! Young Women on Today's Feminism."
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, it's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Richard Harris has the latest addition of this story.
RICHARD HARRIS: This year it was Deke Arndt's turn to break the news in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual teleconference, and you already know what he announced.
DEKE ARNDT: This continues a trend that has gone on for several decades. This is the 34th consecutive year with temperatures above the 20th century average.
HARRIS: But enough about heat already, what about rain and snow?
ARNDT: Precipitation is highly variable from place to place, so there were lots of dry areas, lots of wet areas. But when we average those out, it was also the wettest year on record.
HARRIS: Now, warm air can hold more water, but Arndt can't say whether there's a direct link between the record-tying heat and the record-breaking precipitation. And these are global averages. Arndt said the story was different for those of us in the United States.
ARNDT: Both the temperature and precipitation were above normal. It was the 23rd warmest year on record in the United States. It was the 36th wettest year on record. These both fall into the upper third of the United States climate history, which dates back to 1895.
HARRIS: John Christy, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sees the same general warming trend in his measurements of global temperature. Those are based on satellite measurements of the planet's air from the surface up to 35,000 feet.
JOHN CHRISTY: Well, the take-home lesson is if you have an El Nino, you're going to have a hot year. But I just finished shoveling eight inches of global warming off my driveway this Monday here in Alabama. So whatever the globe is doing, your local weather can have a completely different picture, that's for sure.
HARRIS: And as for the long-term global trend? David Easterling from the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, says that's our doing - global warming, driven by our emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
DAVID EASTERLING: Although we can't attribute any individual event, such as the Russian heat wave, to climate change, it's always important to keep in mind that the probability of these kinds of events do increase as the climate warms.
HARRIS: Richard Harris, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
The last few years have been dismal for many carmakers at the big auto show in Detroit. Here's Chrysler head Olivier Francois this week.
M: I remember...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
M: ...the feeling I had leaving this place one year ago. I remember leaving a booth with no new products, finding my 300 in the basement and driving out into the cold.
SIEGEL: As NPR's Sonari Glinton reports, now that the economy is showing signs of recovery, so are the highest of the high-end luxury cars.
SONARI GLINTON: I'm standing on the floor of the North American International Auto Show. It's better known as the Detroit Auto Show. And the question is: How is this year's show different than, say, last year's? Well, I can find one of the answers here at Bentley.
M: So I'm Alasdair Stewart, and I'm the board member for sales, marketing and after-sales for Bentley.
GLINTON: Bentley, the British luxury carmaker was here at the Detroit Auto Show last year, but they had nothing new to show. This year, things are different. There are three new models completely redesigned. The starting price? About $150,000. So who's putting that kind of money down in this economy?
M: People that absolutely recognize the value of a car like this - the beautiful craftsmanship, you know, this sort of sensuous refinement, if you like, in the car, and you've got authenticity.
GLINTON: How are sales doing now?
M: Sales are good. We had - we're about 11 percent up.
GLINTON: Steve Janisse is with Porsche. Janisse says it was more than just a bad economy that hurt Porsche.
M: The ones who are buying the cars still had the capability and the capacity to buy a luxury sports car. However, it was more of a mind-set.
GLINTON: Yup. Remember the disdain for conspicuous consumption?
M: They didn't want to be seen as the one on the block who just went and bought a new Porsche or a new Ferrari or a new Bentley, whatever it may be, if, you know, maybe their neighbor just lost their job or something like that.
GLINTON: Rebecca Lindland, an analyst with IHS Automotive, says buyers of luxury brands are trying to be more subtle.
M: People are coming in and ordering the exact same car, just a new version of it, so that people don't know that they've gotten a new car, which I thought was very symbolic.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GLINTON: Bob Lutz has been going to auto shows for decades and decades. He's worked at Ford, Chrysler, BMW, and he recently retired as vice chairman of General Motors. Lutz says this show is different.
M: Comparing to recent ones, it's a lot more upbeat. There's more color, more light, more new models. And I think this is the show that will be remembered as when people first understood that the domestic automobile industry is back to being number one.
GLINTON: Back up in the luxury car department, Alasdair Stewart with Bentley says he's cautiously optimistic about the future of high-end brands and the economy. Stewart reluctantly let me get behind the wheel of Bentley's $280,000 car - yup, $280,000.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DOOR CLOSING)
M: So you can immediately hear the quiet and the calm of the inside of the cabin.
GLINTON: Well, Mr. Stewart, thank you so much.
M: All right. OK. Thank you very much, indeed.
GLINTON: From inside a Bentley, Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
NPR's Jason Beaubien takes us there.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
JASON BEAUBIEN: Unidentified Man: (speaking foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF SERMON)
BEAUBIEN: Unidentified Man: (speaking foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF SERMON)
BEAUBIEN: As Pope John Paul II said here in 1983, the cardinal warned, something must change in this country. He called on Haitians to be brave, work together and not give up as they enter the second year of the recovery from the disaster.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
BEAUBIEN: Monsignor Louis Kebreau, the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Haiti, said Haitians must unite for a single cause.
LOUIS KEBREAU: SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE
BEAUBIEN: Today must mark the true reconstruction and healing of the country, Kebreau said.
(SOUNDBITE OF SINGING)
BEAUBIEN: Thirty-nine-year-old Altagrace Charlotin was sitting on a pile of rubble in front of what used to be one of the stately wooden doors of the church.
ALTAGRACE CHARLOTIN: (Through translator) I don't think things are getting better. If you look around, the population is still under tents. Like I tell people, get yourself out of this. Don't wait for the government or international groups to come. Just like me, I fixed my home myself, did what I had to do. Even though I don't have the means to provide for myself, at least I repaired my home and I have a place to stay.
BEAUBIEN: For many people, this anniversary is as much about today as it is about what happened a year ago. At the golf course camp, Boncon Coulange runs a small shop from a stand in front of his shack. He sells cold drinks, canned milk, cigarettes. Coulange says things are getting worse in Haiti.
BONCON COULANGE: (speaking foreign language)
BEAUBIEN: Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Anthony Kuhn is in Brisbane, and has this report.
(SOUNDBITE OF RUSHING WATER)
ANTHONY KUHN: Earlier today, police urged Brisbane residents in low-lying areas to evacuate. Some 4,000 of them made their way to evacuation centers, including resident Brian Knapp. He says he had already moved his furniture out and today he had just enough time to drive through the water-covered streets to safety.
NORRIS: Round about midday, I heard on loudspeakers, the police must have been going around saying: You have to get out now. So I got in the car and just when down locally, just to see where the water was, and it was covering the road just around the corner from us. So I went back home, told my wife, we got in the cars and probably just got through.
NORRIS: My house is under water, completely under water, like nothing so there's nowhere else to go is there?
KUHN: Jesse Dangerfield is an expectant young mother arriving at an evacuation center at a Brisbane stadium.
NORRIS: We were one of the lucky ones. Everyone thought that it wasn't actually going to happen. So we were just like, no, I'm out of here. I don't want to stay here. And then it kind of felt like we were like trapped, because we didn't know where the high ground was, and it was just scary.
KUHN: Anna Bligh, the premier, or governor, of the northeastern state of Queensland, predicted that on Thursday, Brisbane residents would awake see unprecedented damage to their city, although, she noted, perhaps not quite as apocalyptic as predicted.
NORRIS: Brisbane has had a slight reprieve with the peak tomorrow expected slightly lower, but nevertheless an event that is going to devastate the city with anywhere between 20 and 30,000 people affected.
KUHN: Bligh added she was confident that Queensland's battered economy, including its key mining and agriculture sectors, could bounce back quickly from this major setback.
NORRIS: We are a large part of the Australian economy, and we're seeing some of our major industries catastrophically affected. The coal industry will take several weeks, and in some cases months, to get back to full production.
KUHN: Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Brisbane
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
A new housing study offers a grim forecast for some parts of the West. It says areas hit hardest by home foreclosures may never fully recover. As NPR's Karen Grigsby Bates reports, that raises big questions about the future of some neighborhoods that spring up during boom times.
KAREN GRIGSBY BATES: This is something that's happening way too infrequently these days.
NORRIS: Cedar-lined closets, lots of built-ins, fabulous walk-in pantry.
GRIGSBY BATES: Now, buyers slowly are coming back, looking for amenities these her husband, Bill, also a broker, is outlining.
NORRIS: Granite counter tops to travertine flooring, stainless steel appliances.
GRIGSBY BATES: Bill Velto says this neighborhood has fared comparatively well because of its location, just east of L.A. County. It's a reasonable commute, and for some the price makes the drive worth it.
NORRIS: Well, you know, back in the old day it was go west, my friend, go west. Now, it's kind of go east, my friend, go east, because of the values.
GRIGSBY BATES: A new study commissioned by the Mortgage Bankers Association's Research Institute for Housing America looked at how plummeting real estate values are dragging down several American cities.
NORRIS: The story's not over, but my sense is the demand drop is significant and persistent, and for some of these places it will be a long time before they fully recover.
GRIGSBY BATES: Jim Follain, an economist and senior fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany authored the study. He says the current housing downturn is reminiscent of the erosion of several industrial cities in the North and Midwest.
NORRIS: Well, I think we believe that there might be some insights about the current situation by looking at what I call traditional declining cities, which you think about some of the places in the Rust Belt.
GRIGSBY BATES: The current housing mess has adversely affected the American economy for the long term says John Wasik, author of a book called "The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome."
NORRIS: I think the real estate market, at least in residential areas, in some of the worst-hit areas, especially in, say, Central and Southern California, are going to be hobbled for at least a generation.
GRIGSBY BATES: Those days are long gone. But John Wasik says hard-hit areas will continue pay a huge price for those easy money mortgages.
NORRIS: Many people finance without any down payment at all. So those are the people who had no economic stake whatsoever in staying in those properties, and subsequently became, you know, part of the foreclosure process.
GRIGSBY BATES: Today it's possible to find a good deal where there used to be none. But the uncertainty of where prices are headed makes buyers and lenders hesitant, which deepens the problem, says economist Jim Follain.
NORRIS: And that's the fear, I think, that, you know, will my neighborhood be one that is going to be particularly slow to recover.
GRIGSBY BATES: Karen Grigsby Bates, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Now to a doctor who spent much of last year dealing with the aftermath of the earthquake. David Walton is with the group Partners in Health. He's worked in Haiti for 15 years. Welcome to the program, Dr. Walton.
DAVID WALTON: Thanks so much for having me.
NORRIS: You know, I'd like to get a sense from you of what the last year has been like. Immediately after the earthquake you were treating victims in the general hospital in Port-au-Prince and then later you had to deal with the cholera outbreak and people who were still trying to find a stable place to live. As you reflect back, what's your predominant feeling on this anniversary?
WALTON: But as I reflect on the year and I look around, you know, not much has changed. There are some places in Port-au-Prince that you would think the earthquake happened two weeks ago, three weeks ago. There's been a lot of talk about the aid that's come through and a lot of talk about everything that has been done. But overall I think we haven't been as successful as we could be. You know, this is the latest chapter in the tragedy that is Haiti.
MARTIN: How do you control something like that? What is the hope there? How do you bring that kind of thing under control?
WALTON: So unless we deal with the underlying issues that allowed cholera to spread so rapidly, it will almost be impossible to control.
NORRIS: I know that there aren't any simple answers, but is there something that's somewhat simple that could be done almost immediately to help bring this under control?
WALTON: Also, I think there has to be massive investments in creating new systems for potable water, distributing chlorine tabs to the population. You know, people here have been suffering for a long time from a variety of maladies, from really horrendous living conditions, et cetera. And because things are so bad, you know, to incrementally improve the situation isn't as hard as it would seem.
NORRIS: How long will you stay in Haiti?
WALTON: I'm here for the long term. I have the privilege of being able to work here, splitting my time between here and Boston. And, you know, this is my life's calling. And so, I expect to die here an old man.
NORRIS: Well, Dr. Walton, I hope that we'll have other opportunities to talk to you in the future. Thank you very much for your time.
WALTON: Thanks so much for having me.
NORRIS: Dr. David Walton is the deputy chief of mission to Haiti for Partners in Health. He's in Mirebalais, that's 40 miles north of Port-au-Prince.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As NPR's Audie Cornish reports, it was a moment for condolences and reflection.
AUDIE CORNISH: House Resolution Number 32 encompassed many things. The clerk read off condolences to the families of the victims, a condemnation of the violence and an affirmation of democratic principles.
P: Nine, honors the service and leadership of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, a distinguished member of this House, as she courageously fights to recover.
CORNISH: Speaker of the House John Boehner set the tone with a tearful call for lawmakers to come together.
JOHN BOEHNER: The needs of this institution have always risen above partisanship. And what this institution needs right now is strength, wholly and uplifting strength, the strength to grieve with the families of the fallen, to pray for the wounded and to turn a way forward, no matter how painful and difficult it may be.
CORNISH: And minority leader Nancy Pelosi was among those who offered prayers for the health of Congresswoman Giffords.
NANCY PELOSI: She came to Congress full of ideas and we will long continue to be blessed by them, look forward to when she is present with us on the floor. She has spoken out courageously and led boldly when the times demanded it.
CORNISH: Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
STENY HOYER: We do not know, of course, the specific motive which led the perpetrator of this crime to act, nor can we draw conclusions as to specific causes. But it seems to me it is a time for us to reflect on the heightened anger being projected on our public debate and the daily denigration of those with whom we disagree.
CORNISH: Indiana Republican Mike Pence, however, said that while democracy relies on heavy doses of civility, lawmakers should not fear free and open debate.
MIKE PENCE: No expressed opinion on the left or the right was to blame for Saturday's attack. And we must resist efforts to suggest otherwise, because to do so has the potential to inhibit and erode our freedom.
CORNISH: Audie Cornish, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Martin Kaste reports that people were trying to understand Jared Loughner long before Saturday's tragic shooting.
MARTIN KASTE: Steve Woods has lived next door for seven years.
STEVE WOODS: I've seen Jared walk down the street several times and, like I've said, my son will try to say hi to him and he still wouldn't say hi or anything. Just bundled up in his hoodie, he's got his ear buds in and just doing his own thing going down the street.
KASTE: Loughner's father, Randy, moved here three decades ago when this was a lonelier place. As things got more crowded, the family seemed to close in on itself. Woods points to the high bushes around the backyard.
WOODS: They just really just didn't want to be bothered - leave us alone, we're just going to do our own thing - and now this.
KASTE: Unidentified Man: I'm just here to support the family. Anybody else? Thanks for your patience, guys. No other statement.
KASTE: Neither side knows what it's talking about, says Amber Troy.
AMBER TROY: He definitely thought that the government was controlling his mind, but he didn't say which side.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KASTE: Troy took a poetry writing class with Loughner at Pima Community College last spring.
TROY: A lot of the times when he spoke, none of us understood what he was trying to say, honestly.
KASTE: The words you could understand but the ideas you couldn't.
TROY: Right, yeah. The words we could understand. Like, he wasn't like mumbling or anything. The words we could understand but where he was coming from, what he meant by them, what he was - the concepts that he was trying to get across, like, none of us could really grasp.
KASTE: But it wasn't ideological, she says. He just seemed to want to get a rise out of people. Troy recalls a moment when another student had just finished reading an autobiographical poem about abortion.
TROY: So all of us are just very somber, she's in tears, and Jared starts laughing and a lot. And we all just kind of look at him strangely. And then he starts bursting out about tying a bomb to the fetus and making a baby bomb. Yeah.
KASTE: Loughner wrote his own poetry in the class. Another student, Don Coorough saved a copy and reads a bit.
DON COOROUGH: (reading) Awaking on the first day of school, pain of a morning hangover; attending a weightlifting class for college credit, attempting to exercise since freshman year of high school. Crawling out of bed and walking to the shower, warm water hitting my back. Eureka, thoughts of being promiscuous with a female again.
KASTE: Coorough said Loughner had the poem memorized and he stood up in class and performed it with great drama, at one point grabbing his crotch. But Coorough says the poem itself is strangely empty.
COOROUGH: I mean, most of us, when we have a eureka-moment, it's something much larger and much more grand and much more engaging than, oh, I want to have some sex.
KASTE: Loughner's friends talk about a change over the last few years. He didn't last long at jobs and he was rejected by the Army. A friend from high school days, Travis Smith, wrote to NPR that Loughner, quote, "wasn't always a bad person." He says there were growing signs of mental illness.
SIEGEL: And yet, while many people thought Loughner was strange, no one claims to have seen this coming. Certainly not Amber Troy from the poetry class.
TROY: Oh, he was definitely strange. And, like I said, he wasn't the kind of person that I was going to go, you know, have coffee with because I thought he was strange. But I mean, none of us were really afraid for our safety.
KASTE: Martin Kaste, NPR News, Tucson.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Jackie Northam reports.
JACKIE NORTHAM: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on a tour of Arab states, called the mass resignation in Beirut irresponsible.
HILLARY CLINTON: We view what happened today as a transparent effort by those forces inside Lebanon, as well as interests outside of Lebanon, to subvert justice and undermine Lebanon's stability and progress. Trying to bring the government down as a way to undermine the special tribunal is an abdication of the responsibility, but it also will not work.
NORTHAM: Clinton said when all the parties, including Hezbollah, formed the unity government, they agreed to support the tribunal. She said the U.N. probe wasn't only about justice for the former prime minister but many others who were killed and injured in the bombing nearly six year ago. Clinton stressed the work of the tribunal must go on, despite the collapse of the government.
CLINTON: We believe that the work of the special tribunal must go forward so justice can be served and impunity ended. We believe that the leaders of Lebanon have an ongoing responsibility to serve the interests of their own people, not outside forces.
NORTHAM: Bilal Saab, a Mideast security researcher at the University of Maryland, says the resignation of the Hezbollah cabinet members has created a dangerous situation in Lebanon.
BILAL SAAB: Nobody can really control the streets, so everybody is really going to be careful about what they do, what they say in public. This is a really very fragile situation.
NORTHAM: Saab says the situation will likely be exacerbated when results of the U.N. investigation are released and indictments are handed down. But Saab says there's really nothing any of Lebanon's factional leaders can do about that, including Prime Minister Hariri.
SAAB: To stop that train right now is absolutely ridiculous. I don't see that happening. And if we believe all the statements that he has issued and all the stories that come out of the tribunal that this is really an independent institution that is operating without any political obstacles whatsoever, he has no control over it. So what comes out of the tribunal, the upcoming indictments, he's going to have to basically deal with them in his political struggle with Hezbollah.
NORTHAM: Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
We heard about all this from writer Lisa Grunwald. She learned about practice babies while doing research for a different book. Her discovery led her to write a novel about one fictional practice baby, the irresistible Henry House.
LISA GRUNWALD: When I first read about this I thought it was sort of weird and a little creepy. But in fact, at the times in which this took place, everything was considered a possible opportunity for scientific approach, and child care was no exception.
NORRIS: Well, it turns out on the other side of the radio, practice moms were listening.
BARBARA HUTCHISON: I just stopped what I was doing and tried to listen to every word because it was so amazing to me that you and the author were speaking about something that I actually experienced so long ago.
NORRIS: That's Barbara Hutchison. She emailed us after hearing our story. In the late 1950s at a college in Pennsylvania, she enrolled in a six-week home management course. She and five other women shared a house. They learned how to cook and run the household, and for a week, each of them played mother to a baby borrowed by the college.
HUTCHISON: We happened to have had a little boy, and his name was Tommy. And we were allowed to meet the adoptive parents. We were, of course, all crying as we said goodbye to the baby, but we were so happy, and they were so happy, that it was a very, very positive experience for me.
NORRIS: If it's not too difficult, could you describe for us what Tommy looked like, and do you know whatever happened to him? Did you make any attempt to follow up on his life?
HUTCHINSON: I don't think we would have been allowed to do that, but we were so reassured of this little boy going to a happy home and probably very, very busy as college students, maybe didn't think about that. But I can still remember trying to learn how to bathe him, you know, while he was wiggling, and then picking him up and holding him. So he had dark hair, he was just a darling little boy. You can imagine as young women of that age, we just all loved him.
NORRIS: What did you learn in that program?
HUTCHINSON: Today we would do that in a day care center. So the idea that there were multiple people loving the baby really didn't trouble us, and it still doesn't trouble me.
NORRIS: Barbara, I must say the line in the email that you sent to us that really grabbed me was when you talked about Tommy. You wrote in that email, I can close my eyes at 71 years old and see our baby's face, and feel him in my arms. He's still that vivid for you?
HUTCHISON: Yes. I've thought about it many times because when I had my children, I felt more prepared. My college was always promoting leadership in women, but they knew that we were going to leave school and get married. It was the '50s, you know. I think they were trying to prepare us to be the best we could be in those roles.
NORRIS: Is it a bit of irony that in the name of progress that your children or your grandchildren won't have access to this kind of instruction?
HUTCHINSON: Exactly, I know. I think about that. And I think my children and my grandchildren are probably thinking, gosh, you know, I didn't know you did that, and probably a lot of the things I did with them, and still do with them come of that program.
NORRIS: Well, Barbara Hutchison, thank you so much for speaking with us.
HUTCHISON: You're so welcome.
NORRIS: Barbara Hutchison took care of a so-called practice baby as a student at Seton Hill University in the late 1950s.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
In Tucson, they're lined up for blocks. Thousands of people wait patiently in the southwest sun for a seat at this evening's memorial for the victims of last Saturday's attack. President Obama is the draw for Mario Zickarelli.
NORRIS: I know it's a huge issue throughout the country - the amount of media attention that's been paid, it's just been unreal and rightfully so. And I really want to hear the president's views on it.
NORRIS: And Ernestina Talib said she's grateful the president is attending.
NORRIS: Everyone is like all crazy and scared and angry, and I think he, you know, it's his job kind of, to kind of lead this memorial service and start to give people the beginning of closure a little bit, so.
NORRIS: And, Ted, describe for us the scene and the mood there ahead of this memorial.
TED ROBBINS: People who are from here talk about the individuals affected. Everybody seems to know somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. A couple of students from Colorado we talked with spoke about Columbine, and they were young then, but they feel the need to be around others. And that seems to be the main mood tonight...
NORRIS: And that's...
ROBBINS: ...today, I should say.
NORRIS: Mara, has the White House given us any indication as to what President Obama might say this evening?
MARA LIASSON: Well, the White House says that he's going to be talking about healing, not politics. He'll be focusing on the victims' lives, not unlike the way he did in the memorial service for the Fort Hood shootings. He also told us on Monday what he wanted to say. He kind of read the stage directions or at least the instructions to his speechwriters, including him, when he said I think it's important for the country as a whole and the people of Arizona to feel as if we are speaking this directly to our sense of loss but also speaking to our hopes for the future and how out of this tragedy we can come together as a stronger nation. That is what he wants to do tonight.
NORRIS: He wants to talk about healing. But, Mara, I imagine there are some who might be disappointed that the president doesn't make an issue of the political environment, does not at least touch that.
LIASSON: Well, there might be some who are disappointed, but I don't think he intends to wade into that debate. You know, in 2008, the president ran to change the political tone. I think White House aides see that he now has a chance to do that again. They've been eager to get back to what they call first principles, to go back to that 2004 speech even in Boston where he talked about, you know, there are no red states or blue states, it's just United States. And I think that he was once seen as the antidote to polarized political discourse. And now, here's his chance to inhabit that role again.
NORRIS: Ted, I've only got a second or two to give you. Is there any one thing that people there say they want to hear from the president?
ROBBINS: They want to hear calm healing come together, and I think really pretty much what Mara just said.
NORRIS: Thank you, Ted. That's NPR's Ted Robbins in Tucson and Mara Liasson is with us here in the studio. Thanks to both of you.
LIASSON: Thank you, Michele.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Today, Sarah Palin released a video in which she speaks about the shooting in Tucson.
M: Like millions of Americans, I learned of the tragic events in Arizona on Saturday and my heart broke for the innocent victims. No words can fill the hole left by the death of an innocent, but we do mourn for victims' families as we express our sympathy.
SIEGEL: Karen Tumulty is national political correspondent for The Washington Post, and she joins me now. Welcome to the program.
M: Thank you. It's great to be here.
SIEGEL: This video looks like more than just a comment from a former vice presidential candidate. What does it look like to you?
M: This was - you know, she waited four days to make this comment. She had been in the middle of a lot of this controversy over our national discourse. And so, it was a very calibrated statement that I think was designed to put her into the conversation today.
SIEGEL: This is what Sarah Palin said about people who've linked her words with potential acts of violence.
M: Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
SIEGEL: A blood libel. What do you make of that?
M: A blood libel has referred to the false stories that were once propagated, that Jews had actually, you know, used the blood of Christians in their rituals.
SIEGEL: And as you said, that accusation in Medieval Europe might have resulted in downgrading the legal status of Jews or killing Jews or expelling Jews - pretty strong words, the blood libel.
M: Yes, and it's unclear, you know, exactly the context in which Sarah Palin had meant this. But this coming against this very, you know, professionally produced video is sort of startling and, in and of itself, became a controversy, that in some ways it has outweighed what she had to say on the - her overall message today.
SIEGEL: Well do you think that this video enhances Sarah Palin's claim to a leadership role, say, among Tea Party conservatives?
M: And had this statement not included that one controversial and provocative phrase, blood libel, I think it would very clearly have been seen as an effort to reach out to a much broader audience.
SIEGEL: Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post, thank you very much for talking with us.
M: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Rob Minchel is a producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Brisbane. He is not just reporting on the floods, his own house is surrounded by water right now and he joins us by cell phone. Welcome to the program.
M: Good afternoon.
SIEGEL: And where are you right now?
M: Well, Robert, I'm in a very typical Brisbane suburb, a leafy middle-class suburb about three or four miles from the city center. The good news is that I awoke this morning to receding floodwaters. My house is still surrounded by water, but the water is - most of the water has left my property now.
SIEGEL: And are you inside the house, or on the roof of the house?
M: All I can see are the remains of rooftops, treetops. Yesterday I saw a car floating by, children's bicycles, bits of furniture, even a refrigerator. It's just an amazing scene.
SIEGEL: Rob, you've described the evacuation of your daughter and your mother. Why are you still there? Why didn't you leave with your family?
M: My escape route was basically to jump onto my roof and swim across the floodwaters to another house, and from that roof escape to higher land behind.
SIEGEL: Do you think, now, seeing the condition of your house, that when the waters recede, that it can be cleaned up and it's still habitable, or are the walls going to have to come down?
M: I mean, the cleaning of - of course, the most important thing is that so many people have lost their lives, and I think that's where my heart goes out now. Not to my own trivial concerns really about cleaning the house and making sure, you know, the DVD's are going to be back, and the technology - and the cars are OK, because (unintelligible) to those people that have really suffered.
SIEGEL: Well, Rob Minchel, thank you very much for talking with us about it.
M: You're very welcome.
SIEGEL: That's Rob Minchel in Brisbane, Australia. He is a producer for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but he is also somebody whose own home has been surrounded by water in these floods.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From Springfield, Illinois, NPR's David Schaper has the story.
SIEGEL: Hey, guys. We're gonna talk tomorrow.
DAVID SCHAPER: As he waited for an elevator in the capitol around 1:30 this morning, a bleary-eyed Illinois Governor Pat Quinn was uncharacteristically quiet about the big income tax increase that had just barely won approval in the Illinois legislature.
SIEGEL: Well, we were happy that the Senate voted that way and the House did too. And we'll talk about it tomorrow morning.
SCHAPER: Quinn says these higher taxes may not be popular but are critical for the state's fiscal survival.
SIEGEL: We have an emergency, a fiscal emergency. Our state was careening towards bankruptcy and fiscal insolvency. Even in the last couple of months, the situation got seriously more dire.
NORRIS: First of all, he inherited a mess.
SCHAPER: Former Illinois Republican Governor Jim Edgar, now a fellow at the University of Illinois Institute for Government and Public Affairs.
NORRIS: It was basically based off of two governors before who I don't think were very fiscally responsible.
SCHAPER: Former Republican governor Edgar says Democrat Quinn is still growing into the job, but he has changed from his more populist outsider days.
NORRIS: Well, I like this Pat Quinn a lot better because now that he's in power, he's got to kind of be a little more responsible than when you're on the outside just throwing bombs all the time. I told him - I said, now you got to catch them, and that's a lot tougher to do.
SCHAPER: Other longtime Illinois political observers here in the state capitol rotunda say Quinn, now secure in a full term in office, can claim victory in the first big test of his leadership.
NORRIS: Well, I think it shows that finally things clicked.
SCHAPER: Bernie Schoenburg is a political writer and columnist for the Springfield State Journal-Register.
NORRIS: I have said from the time he got in, as he changes opinion, Pat Quinn, on this or that, that it has looked as if he's a little wishy-washy on some things and he didn't seem to have the levers of power. Somehow, it all came together.
SCHAPER: David Schaper, NPR News in Springfield, Illinois.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Joshua Farley, the assistant attorney general of Kentucky, told the justices that the smell of marijuana gave police probable cause to believe a crime was occurring in the apartment. And since police heard movement inside after they knocked, they lawfully broke in to prevent evidence from being destroyed.
NORRIS: Does that mean that every two weeks police can walk through an apartment building where there's been previous drug activity, knock on every door, and if they hear noise, break in?
TOTENBERG: Yes, as long as they have separate probable cause to believe a crime is occurring. Here, it was the smell of marijuana.
J: So they sniff at every door, and if there's noise after they knock, they can break in?
TOTENBERG: It would be perfectly fine for the officers to do that.
J: The smell of marijuana is enough to get a warrant. In our system, there's a strong presumption that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant. So why didn't the police do that instead of knocking and alerting the people inside?
J: But Justice Kagan worried about eviscerating the warrant requirement in the Constitution.
SIEGEL: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
BARACK OBAMA: Gratitude for all the...
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Before attending this evening's memorial, the president and first lady visited the wounded at University Medical Center and met with their families.
T: Tucson and America," began on a traditional note with Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN")
NORRIS: After a Native American blessing, the president of the University of Arizona, Robert Shelton, pointed out the young man seated in the front row between President Obama and retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
OBAMA: Among the many heroes this week was one of our students: Daniel Hernandez Jr.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
NORRIS: Hernandez is the intern who rushed to Congresswoman Giffords' side and applied pressure to her wound. Many credit him with saving her life. After receiving a standing ovation, Hernandez himself spoke.
OBAMA: Although I appreciate the sentiment, I must humbly reject the use of the word hero because I am not one. The people that are the heroes are people like Pam Simon...
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: ...Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, Gabe Zimmerman - who unfortunately we lost that day - Ron Barber, the first responders, and also people like Dr. Rhee who have done an amazing job at making sure that Gabby is OK and those who were injured are being treated to the best of our ability.
NORRIS: Arizona's governor, Jan Brewer, delivered remembrances of the victims; Judge John Roll, Gabe Zimmerman, Dorothy Morris, Dorwin Stoddard, Phyllis Schneck and 9-year-old Christina-Taylor Greene.
G: We can never know what Christina might have become. We can't imagine what the families of our six innocent neighbors are feeling. Nor can we know the pain of the wounded, some whom are still struggling for their lives.
NORRIS: After biblical readings from former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder, a solemn President Obama took to the podium with words he said to have labored over all night long.
P: There is nothing I can say that will fill the sudden hole torn in your hearts. But know this: The hopes of a nation are here tonight. We mourn with you for the fallen. We join you in your grief. And we add our faith to yours that Representative Gabrielle Giffords and the other living victims of this tragedy will pull through.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
P: Scripture tells us, there's a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy place where the most high dwells. God is within her. She will not fall. God will help her at break of day.
NORRIS: One of the most rousing moments of that speech in the crowded arena came when President Obama revealed something he had been told happened just after his visit to Congresswoman Giffords.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
P: Gabby opened her eyes, so I can tell you she knows we are here. She knows we love her. And she knows that we are rooting for her to what is undoubtedly going to be a difficult journey. We are there for her.
NORRIS: Full and sustained applause at that moment. President Obama went on to honor Saturday's heroes: Daniel Hernandez, the intern we mentioned before, the men who tackled Jared Loughner, the alleged gunman, as he stopped to reload, and a remarkable senior citizen the president described as petite.
P: Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away the killer's ammunition and undoubtedly saved some lives.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
NORRIS: President Obama also used the occasion to address some of the discourse that has unfolded over the week.
P: And much of this process of debating what might be done to prevent such tragedies in the future is an essential ingredient in our exercise of self-government. But at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who happen to think differently than we do, it's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we're talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.
NORRIS: And President Obama made this appeal.
P: What we cannot do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on each other.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
NORRIS: President...
P: That we cannot do.
NORRIS: President Obama there, speaking tonight at a memorial service in Tucson, Arizona.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Mara, the president is still speaking at the podium, but based on what you've heard so far, what is most striking to you?
MARA LIASSON: He said having this debate is important, but at a time when our discourse has become so polarized it's important not to lay blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do. He talked about talking in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds. That certainly is the way that he's tried to speak tonight.
NORRIS: The folks at the White House are saying that a lot was riding on this, that the president had to strike just the right tone. He stopped short of scolding at people, at really wagging the finger. But he did call for sort of a lifting up of political discourse.
LIASSON: Yes. He said let's use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy, to remind ourselves that all our hopes and dreams are bound together. This is the role that he has, I think, always wanted to play. Now, he became a very polarizing figure, as most ambitious presidents do, but this was an opportunity that he could take to rise above that.
NORRIS: Mara, thanks so much.
LIASSON: Thank you, Michele.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
President Obama did not weigh in on the debate that has been raging since Saturday over the relationship between heated political rhetoric and violence, but he did not exactly ignore it either.
P: If, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy; it did not, but rather because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
NORRIS: E.J., I'm going to begin with you. What struck you most about the president's words tonight? He was seeming to be the healer-in-chief, the preacher-in-chief at one point.
MR: I was struck, for example, by a line - it probably won't get much play in the press the way all of the talk about the need for civility got - but, you know, he said we may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. That's what you'd hear in church and it came with a lot of scriptural references.
NORRIS: Matthew Continetti, the president, as we said earlier, was trying to strike just the right tone here. Do you think that he threaded that needle?
NORRIS: Yeah, I think he did. And I think Obama is at his best when he's at the 30,000-foot-above-ground level, when he can rise above taking sides in any partisan debate like that, which has unfolded since the events on Saturday, and he did that. And as E.J. said, he talked about discourse, but he didn't take a position in the middle of the fight right now.
A: So I think the president is on his way to a successful second half of his first term.
NORRIS: And Mara, I'm going to bring you into this in just a minute. We have an unfortunate benchmark with which to measure him. I mean, he spoke very quickly after the tragic shootings at Fort Hood. If you compare this speech with that address, what do you see and hear? Do you see growth there, differences in the way - I mean, this speech was also a lot of storytelling, which is really where he's at his strongest.
NORRIS: That's right. And you also see a president who just has more experience. He's been in the job longer. He had a huge political setback last November that I think he's working through. And so he also has personal ties to Congressman Giffords and such, so you see a more political - rather a more mature political figure in this speech that we heard tonight.
NORRIS: Mara, there has been much debate over gun control right now in the wake of this shooting, particularly whether people who have mental issues should have access to guns, particularly extended magazine clips. Do we hear anything in the president's speech that might provide us a hint about what position he might take on this or where he might land on the issue of gun control?
MARA LIASSON: So it sounds like he's saying those are legitimate things to discuss in the wake of this. Whether or not the White House is going to get behind any kind of legislation is unclear.
NORRIS: I was struck by his standing back as a referee in these fights, just from the passages Mara read. He was not going out on any limb in this speech. Now, maybe you could see why he decided he did not want this speech to be controversial at all in that sense. Nonetheless, there were no signs here that he is ready to jump into any fight for even very limited gun control.
NORRIS: Interesting tableau there: He's sitting there in the front row; Jan Brewer is there just behind him; a newly-elected member of Congress who had at one point called him the worst president in the world, Dan Quayle's son, who was seated just right behind him. Do you think that this call for a sort of higher level of discourse will take hold here?
NORRIS: Uh, no, because it never does. We're flawed people and we always tend to fall back on partisan heuristics and mindsets. But it was - moments like these does show, I think, the fact of national unity and our common humanity, and that's what maybe we can take comfort, in sights like that which we saw today.
NORRIS: So in the short run, there isn't a lot of hope there. But in the longer run, I think a lot of people are just tired of this kind of division. And an event like this does shake people beyond what they sometimes say in public.
NORRIS: Mara, as someone who spends a lot of time at the White House, what can you tell us just quickly about how the president put these remarks together?
LIASSON: Well, apparently he worked on it himself. He worked on it for many hours. What I think is so interesting is that the White House has really been looking for opportunities to get him back to what they call first principles. And this was one and they took advantage of it.
NORRIS: And by the way, as we prepare to say goodbye, we're listening here to a song called "Simple Gifts." It's performed by the Arizona Choir at tonight's memorial service that was in Tucson at the University of Arizona.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SIMPLE GIFTS")
NORRIS: This is NPR.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
For the next few minutes, we're going to talk taxes and we're going to start with a number: 60. The U.S. tax code has grown so complicated that 60 percent of Americans now pay someone else to do their taxes. That's according to a recent report by the taxpayers advocate within the IRS. The message of the report is clear: The most serious problem facing taxpayers and the agency itself is the complexity of the tax code.
NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY: Pretty much everyone agrees the current tax code is a mess. The IRS's own taxpayer advocate complains Americans have to spend more than 6 billion hours a year just keeping up with the paperwork.
Berkeley economist Laura Tyson says a hodgepodge of tax loopholes - or tax expenditures, as they're known - not only makes filing more complicated. It also costs the U.S. Treasury more than a trillion dollars a year.
Professor LAURA TYSON (Business Administration and Economics, University of California, Berkeley): There is a general view that tax expenditures have gotten way, way out of hand. It's a huge drain on the government's budget.
HORSLEY: So, where do all these expenditures come from? Often from good intentions. Tyson herself contributed to some as an economic advisor in the Clinton administration. Back then, the White House wanted to make it easier for low-income students to pay for college. It wound up doing so through a patchwork of tax breaks, even though Tyson says it would have been easier and more efficient to simply give students money by increasing Pell Grants.
Prof. TYSON: It was impossible. You were not going to get increase in Pell Grant spending. The budgetary committees of the Congress were not going to do that. But they were willing to do a new tax credit or more generous tax credit.
HORSLEY: You see this pattern over and over again. Congress is much more willing to approve a dollar for anything called a tax break than a dollar in direct federal spending even if the effect on government coffers is the same.
As a result, politicians now use the tax code to achieve more and more of their policy goals. Political scientist Christopher Howard of the College of William and Mary says it's a perverse bargain between the two political parties.
Professor CHRISTOPHER HOWARD (Government, College of William & Mary): Republicans in their ideal world would like major tax cuts and perhaps some spending cuts as well. Democrats still want government to do things. And where they find common ground is they can get government to do things by selectively cutting the tax code. It's sort of a convenient plan B for both parties.
HORSLEY: That's why, for example, Congress was able to pass more than $800 billion worth of tax cuts last month, in the name of shoring up the economy, at a time when a similar sized spending bill with the same goal would have had no chance.
Whatever their political appeal, Howard says many tax breaks have unintended consequences.
Prof. HOWARD: A lot of these programs are giving benefits to people who don't seem to be needy under most definitions of need and are sort of encouraging people to engage in behaviors that may not be optimal for society. So they may in fact be overinvesting in housing or overpaying for health insurance.
HORSLEY: The president's deficit commission said the government could raise more money more efficiently by doing away with tax loopholes and lowering tax rates. That won't be easy, though. Everyone likes to blame the special interests. But as the IRS's taxpayer advocate wrote: The special interests are us.
Few Americans want to give up tax breaks for mortgage interests, health insurance or retirement savings.
Dr. EUGENE STEUERLE (Senior Fellow, Urban Institute): Politicians have a tremendous problem asking the middle class to give up something.
HORSLEY: Even so, tax policy expert Eugene Steuerle of the Urban Institute thinks the time finally may have come to rewrite the tax code. Steuerle was instrumental in the last big rewrite a quarter-century ago. And with the government now deep in the red, he says something has to give.
Dr. STEUERLE: The public doesn't like playing games in the tax system either. Given a choice between raising rates and removing tax preferences, they tend to favor removing the tax preferences.
HORSLEY: A simpler code could also give taxpayers more confidence that everyone is paying a fair share. And that could have favorable economic and political effects as well.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
There are new developments this week in an unsolved crime from the civil rights era - the arson of a Louisiana shoe store in December 1964. The owner of the store was inside when it was set ablaze and he died of his injuries four days later.
A group of journalists from the U.S. and Canada calling themselves the Civil Rights Cold Case Project has spent years trying to solve some of these cases.
NORRIS: The journalist at the center of the arson investigation is Stanley Nelson. He's the editor of the Concordia Sentinel in Louisiana and he's been looking into the case for four years. The newspaper published his story yesterday. In it, he names a person suspected of being involved in the crime.
Nelson has been working with David Ridgen, a filmmaker from Toronto who brings us our story today.
A note to listeners. It contains language and graphic descriptions that could be offensive or disturbing.
Mr. STANLEY NELSON (Editor, Concordia Sentinel): Across the river is Concordia Parish. That's Louisiana. This is Adams County.
DAVID RIDGEN: Stanley Nelson works in Ferriday, Louisiana, the home of Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart; just a small town of 3700 people, close to the Mississippi River.
Mr. NELSON: And in the '60s, what very few people know is that this general area may have been the most violent and the bloodiest area for Klan violence in the country, from - during the mid-'60s.
RIDGEN: Nelson grew up here but it wasn't until the FBI published a list of Civil Rights-era cold cases in February 2007 that he heard about the case of Frank Morris. Since then he has written almost every week about his region's turbulent history of white supremacy.
In the 1960s, the FBI conducted two investigations into the Morris arson but there were no arrests. Nelson and the Syracuse University Law School obtained the FBI files from those investigations through a Freedom of Information request.
Mr. NELSON: This is what remains of Frank's store, the foundation. Grass has grown in it but the layout of the store is exactly the same and this is what's left.
RIDGEN: Frank Morris was a personable man, one of the few African-American business owners around Ferriday, and also one of the few who would deal with both whites and blacks. Normally, he'd walk out to the curb to deliver or pick up orders from white women, while blacks did their business inside. Then, late on a December night in 1964, it all ended.
Mr. NELSON: Sometimes after midnight of the 10th, he heard what he described as glass breaking. So he got up to investigate and he said that as he approached the front door, that there was a man standing there. He actually saw two men. The man standing near the front door had a shotgun. The man said, get back in that shop, nigger. And about that time, the other man that had a gasoline can had apparently thrown fuel all over the area, outside and maybe inside 'cause they had broken out the front window.
The man threw the match and Frank said, it took me a long time to get out. So he was walking through a building that was not only on fire - intensely on fire - but it was filled with smoke and he couldn't see. And he was on fire himself.
He emerged from the back door of the shop about the time two Ferriday police officers came driving by.
RIDGEN: Stanley Nelson tracked down one of the police officers who responded, a man named George Sewell.
Mr. GEORGE SEWELL (Retired Police Officer): So we come around the curve, bricks were in the street, fire was in the street. And we got out of the car and we looked, Frank Morris was coming from behind his building, come running towards us. And all I remember is he had - his strap on his undershirt, it was still burning, the band around his shorts was still burning up. His hair looked like it was smoking and had a little fire or something.
RIDGEN: Another report says that as Morris ran out of the shop, he left charred and shredded flesh behind in the shape of his feet. He was rushed to the hospital where he held out, drugged with morphine, for four days before he died.
Reverend Robert Lee, Jr. was friends with Frank Morris. He visited with Frank in the hospital before he died. Stanley Nelson interviewed Reverend Lee who is now 96.
Mr. NELSON: And why do you think they burned his store down?
Reverend ROBERT LEE, Jr.: He was too familiar - white women would come and, if it wasn't too big a job, they'd sit in his place there while he fixed shoes. And maybe y'all, hard for you all to understand this, but back in those days that was crossing - that was crossing the line.
RIDGEN: Stanley Nelson began to call other retired law enforcement officers in the area to find out if they knew anything that could help. That led him to Bill Frasier, who worked as a deputy in the 1980s in Concordia Parish. They agreed to meet and Bill Frasier gave Nelson the biggest break to date in the case.
He started talking about Frasier's former brother-in-law, Arthur Leonard Spencer, a man who told Frasier that he had been in the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. But that wasn't all. Stanley recorded the interview.
Mr. BILL FRASIER (Retired Police Officer): Then I asked him, I said, did y'all ever kill anybody? He said we did accidentally one time. And he said Coonie Poissot - it was two of them in the back seat of a car. He said it was four people but I don't know who the drivers was. And he said he was in the back of the car and had a shotgun. And he said they went to Ferriday to burn a shoe store down.
Mr. NELSON: Spencer had a shotgun.
Mr. FRASIER: Yeah, to burn a shoe store down. And, you know, he said it was like 12, 1:00 in the morning. Wasn't nobody supposed to be there at that time of night. Except that when he shot the shotgun, about the time he shot the shotgun, he said there was a glass at the door. You know, there was a wooden door with a glass. And he said he shot the glass, well a man stuck his face in - he said a man stuck his face in about the time the shotgun go off. Now, he didnt tell me he killed the man. But he said the man died.
RIDGEN: Leonard Spencer is now 71. He was a trucker for 55 years. And by his own admission, he was a member of the Klan when he was in his mid-20s.
Three people from the truck driver's life, all of them related by blood or marriage, say they heard about Leonard Spencer's involvement the night Frank Morris' shop was burned to the ground.
Ms. BRENDA RHODES(ph): Just about everybody belonged to the Klan.
RIDGEN: Brenda Rhodes was married to Leonard Spencer from 1967 to 1971. She tells Nelson that her ex-husband didn't talk about the night at Frank Morris' shop. But a friend of his, Coonie Poissot, did. He described it to her in great detail.
Ms. RHODES: Yeah, they threw a match.
Mr. NELSON: He mentioned that. And did he mention that the man died?
Ms. RHODES: He lit that son of a bitch up.
Mr. NELSON: That was his words?
Ms. RHODES: Yep.
RIDGEN: And Leonard Spencer's own son, named Boo Spencer, says he has heard his father and others in the area talk about the Morris arson most of his life.
Mr. NELSON: Did you ever hear what the reason was that the shoe shop, they wanted it burned down?
Mr. BOO SPENCER: 'Cause they wasn't going to have a nigger there. Wasn't going to have a nigger establishment there.
RIDGEN: Boo has a criminal record and is currently on probation. Boo says he loves his father but he believes the Morris family deserves to see justice served.
Mr. NELSON: You think there's any regrets he has about...
Mr. SPENCER: I think he's sorry that he might get caught up finally.
Mr. NELSON: You don't think he has any regrets about what happened to Frank Morris...
Mr. SPENCER: No.
Mr. NELSON: ...or whatever?
Mr. SPENCER: No.
Mr. NELSON: Yeah.
Mr. SPENCER: No. No, he ain't sorry about nothing, I don't imagine.
RIDGEN: Next for Stanley Nelson was to talk to Leonard Spencer himself. Leonard Spencer lives in Rayville, a small crossroads in rural Louisiana. His aging farmhouse is at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by corn fields. They talk on the porch.
Stanley Nelson asks him about Coonie Poissot, now dead, the Klansman who had talked to Brenda Rhodes about Leonard Spencer.
Mr. NELSON: Well, we was talking about Coonie Poissot but you don't recall him or...
Mr. LEONARD SPENCER: Never heard that name in my life, as a matter of fact.
RIDGEN: Leonard Spencer may well deny knowing him. But his ex-wife Brenda Rhodes and son, Boo Spencer, contradict him.
And then Nelson asks Leonard Spencer about his time in the Klan.
Mr. NELSON: Did you ever hear him talk about any projects they were going to do or anything like that?
Mr. L. SPENCER: No. I'm going to tell you again now. I've been around. I mean, I've been straight up with you. I'm telling you truth about what you asking. We can talk all night, I don't care.
Mr. NELSON: Yes.
Mr. L. SPENCER: But I know it's more to this than what you're telling me. I just want you to know. I just want that understood. I mean, I'm not stupid. I want that understood. Now, we'll go ahead on what you asked me.
Now, what was the last thing you asked me?
Mr. NELSON: Did they ever talk about things they were going to...
Mr. L. SPENCER: Oh, well. No, because see, I do remember this - 'cause, again, I was too young, too small. They had what's called a wrecking crew. You know, if - like if, the way I understood it, if people - of course, the black and white was a big issue then.
Mr. NELSON: Oh, yeah.
Mr. L. SPENCER: So like if something was going on in Ferriday or Vidalia, they would send our wrecking crew. You know, I think it was 10 or 12 our men, I don't know.
Mr. NELSON: Yeah.
Mr. L. SPENCER: But anyway, if something was going up here in Raywood or Holler Ridge, then maybe Ferriday or Vidalia, you know. I remember that part of it.
Mr. NELSON: They'd switch back, do things for you...
Mr. L. SPENCER: Yeah, and that was so people wouldn't know where we were.
Mr. NELSON: Yeah.
Mr. L. SPENCER: But that's all I know about that.
Mr. NELSON: But you never heard anything about the one in Ferriday, about the shoe shop...
Mr. L. SPENCER: I told you. You were the first one that ever told me anything about Ferriday. But like I said, (unintelligible), never knew anything (unintelligible) in Ferriday...
RIDGEN: Last November, Nelson was ready to publish his story, and he called the Department of Justice for comment. They asked him to delay publication. Last week, he finally got to interview Tom Perez, an assistant attorney general, the man who runs the civil rights division of the Department of Justice.
MR. NELSON: We were asked by both the FBI and the Justice Department to hold our story beginning back in November and through December. Can you comment on, you know, as specific as you can be as to why we were asked to hold the story? We were told that it could jeopardize the case, and can you be more specific about that?
Mr. TOM PEREZ (Assistant Attorney General): You know, I really can't. And again, I apologize. You know, whenever we have investigations, oftentimes information flow is a one-way street. We ask people for information and we are not in a position to explain why we ask certain things. And I certainly appreciate the fact that that can be frustrating, but we are concerned about pursuing the case and that is really the sole motivator for us as we have an active investigation. And I can't get any more specific.
RIDGEN: Yesterday, here in Ferriday, Stanley Nelson's article rolled off the presses and onto the newsstand. And again, Arthur Leonard Spencer was asked on camera whether he was involved the night Frank Morris died. My colleague David Paperny asked the question.
Mr. DAVID PAPERNY: Well, let me ask you that directly then. Were you at all involved in the burning down of Frank Morris' shoe shop in December of 1964 in Ferriday, Louisiana?
Mr. L. SPENCER: Absolutely not. Never heard of the man. Didn't even know about that.
RIDGEN: Spencer does confirm that two FBI agents recently came to see him.
Mr. L. SPENCER: I know they talked about 30 minutes, and thanked me and I gave them my phone - my cell phone and everything. I said, call me, whatever, you know.
RIDGEN: Stanley Nelson believes his story could lead to a grand jury, and even an indictment. But whatever happens, he just wants the truth.
Mr. NELSON: I had hoped to feel this burden off of my shoulder, but it doesn't feel lifted right now. I mean, I feel good about Frank Morris, I feel good that maybe the FBI will move, but there is so much more to do.
RIDGEN: For NPR News, I'm David Ridgen in Ferriday, Louisiana.
NORRIS: David Ridgen is a member of the Civil Rights Cold Case Project. It's coordinated through the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, California and Paperny Films in Vancouver.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michel Norris.
A slow economy has forced food pantries and soup kitchens into high gear, with nearly 50 percent more people depending on them since 2006. While food banks struggle to meet demand, theyre also pushing themselves to focus not just on how many people they can feed, but on what they can feed them.
From member stations WPLN in Nashville, Blake Farmer reports.
BLAKE FARMER: Junk food is becoming like the unwanted houseguest food banks just can't say no to.
Now, one of the baskets here that's sitting in front of us is full on candy corns.
Ms. TASHA KENNARD (Second Harvest Food Bank, Tennessee): Correct.
FARMER: What are you going to do with those?
Ms. KENNARD: We do not turn away those types of items. So if we receive candy or sodas of any type, we do sort them and we make them available to our agencies.
FARMER: Tasha Kennard from Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee explains the open arms policy as volunteers in the warehouse separate canned corn from the candy corn.
G.B. Howell is on soft drink duty.
Mr. G.B. HOWELL (Second Harvest Volunteer): I happen to be packing sodas right now, so I just named - scavenged those out.
FARMER: Along with all the staple items, boxes of generic soda make their way to soup kitchens and emergency food pantries, like this one at Nashville's Ladies of Charity.
Ms. MARION FORD: Oh, this is a heavy one.
FARMER: Marion Ford grabs two grocery bags filled with eggs and milk, plus a few treats. Ford is a good example of why food banks are getting concerned about nutrition.
Ms. FORD: Five grandchildren Im raising at home - me, myself and my husband. He's diabetic and has a heart condition, but I have problems myself. I have diabetes. I have blood pressure. But I still go on.
Dr. MARY FLYNN (Nutritionist, Brown University): The rate of obesity is so much higher in the low-income population because of the hunger/obesity paradox.
FARMER: High-calorie, low-nutrition foods tend to be relatively inexpensive, says Dr. Mary Flynn, a nutritionist at Brown University. So it's not unusual for hungry people to also be overweight.
Flynn says food banks do no favors dishing out the same cheap fare available at a corner store, particularly soft drinks. But even as a board member of a food bank in Rhode Island, she can't get the organization to completely refuse soda.
Dr. FLYNN: I was told that, well, we give it out because if we don't take it, we won't get other food from people when they're distributing it.
FARMER: Much of the junk food comes from grocery stores, which donate old or damaged products. But food bank leaders like Jaynee Day are reluctant to get picky with their biggest donors because they get good stuff from retailers, too, like chicken and ground beef.
Ms. JAYNEE DAY (Second Harvest Food Bank): Now, does that come with also some nonperishable food items that probably aren't on the top of our list? Sometimes that does occur.
FARMER: Food banks still acknowledge the responsibility to watch what their clients are eating. Feeding America, a national umbrella group, has set a five-year goal to get 75 percent of what's distributed classified as nutritious.
To make up for the sweets and soda they have trouble saying no to, many food banks are loading up on things like fresh produce - even if it means more work.
Unidentified Woman: As long as it's not squishy it's okay.
FARMER: Volunteers in Nashville pick through 50 pallets of butternut squash donated by a local farmer. They have to move fast before mold starts to set in. Nutritious eating can cost more, too. Triada Stampas with the Food Bank for New York City says her organization has started buying low-sodium canned beans.
Ms. TRIADA STAMPAS (Food Bank for New York City): Our advisory committee said, you know, well, if its within a 10 percent margin in price, we would prefer the healthier, low-sodium goods.
FARMER: Healthful eating is often a choice of quality over quantity. And since food banking is a volume business, any decision that results in less instead of more takes nerve, especially when the need is so great.
Stampas says half of the food pantries and soup kitchens in New York City had to turn away people last year for lack of food.
For NPR News, I'm Blake Farmer in Nashville.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Renaud Garcia-Fons is known among jazz fans as a virtuoso of the acoustic bass. The sounds he conjures from his five-string bass have won him admirers around the world. For his latest project, the Spanish-French musician wanted to concentrate on composition and to connect the music of East and West.
Betto Arcos reports.
BETTO ARCOS: Renaud Garcia-Fons says the initial thinking behind his new album "Mediterranees" was not to compose music for a band but to make a concept album inspired by music across the Mediterranean, and that took him back to his childhood.
Mr. RENAUD GARCIA-FONS (Musician): When I was in family, I was, of course, listening Spanish music, but when I grew up in Paris, I had chance to listen to many different music from north of Africa, for example, which is Mediterranean. And after that, I had really a passion for all the music coming from Middle East, from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt.
ARCOS: Garcia-Fons says all of these musics share common elements, and he wanted to find the connections.
(Soundbite of music, "Aljamiado")
Mr. GARCIA-FONS: This is what I think: We have, really, some bridges. Of course, each tradition is unique, but the sense of this music was also to try to establish some bridges between.
(Soundbite of music, "Aljamiado")
ARCOS: His exploration begins in Andalucia, in the south of Spain, with a piece called "Aljamiado," a reference to the Spanish language from the time when the region was ruled by the Moors.
(Soundbite of music, "Aljamiado")
Mr. GARCIA-FONS: For me, it's a good illustration of the union between Occident and Orient, you know?
ARCOS: The music moves from West to East, from Spain to the south of France, Italy, Greece, to the northern tip of the Mediterranean.
(Soundbite of music, "Bosphore")
Mr. GARCIA-FONS: So all the first pieces are more in the Occidental way, and then the big change starts in the piece called "Bosphore," because the trip arrive finally on the Bosphorus. So we reach the Orient and start some more Oriental influences.
(Soundbite of music, "Bosphore")
ARCOS: Unlike some of his previous recordings, the new album is not centered around his five-string acoustic bass but on composition. Nevertheless, Yatrika Shah-Rais, music director at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, where Garcia-Fons performed recently with his quartet, says Garcia-Fons is a virtuoso.
Ms. YATRIKA SHAH-RAIS (Music Director, Skirball Cultural Center): This is a world-class musician that deserves to be truly acknowledged for what he does. He's unique in every sense of the word. He's unique in his approach to compositions, to his music. He's unique in his technique. He's unique in the way that he has revolutionized the bass, and simply, he has a fantastic band.
(Soundbite of music)
ARCOS: Garcia-Fons says he has always been intrigued with the notion that the roots of Western music come from the East, and he believes that thread is present not just in Western Europe but also in the Americas.
Mr. GARCIA-FONS: This is a fascinating point for me, and this is what also I really appreciate in all American music, from south to north, is that we can feel this influence from the Mediterranean area. And I think maybe the common relative is baroque music. I heard that many baroque musicians find some codex, for example, in Mexico, so I think this was one of the bridge for the music to come here and to meet other people.
ARCOS: And this aspect of music is very important to him. Garcia-Fons says his new record is about a yearning for a common identity. Identity, he says, is something everyone can share, as we all have something in common, and music can be the bridge to connect us.
For NPR News, I'm Betto Arcos.
(Soundbite of music)
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
When you think about military readiness, spirituality may not leap to mind. But it does for the Army, which began assessing the spiritual fitness of troops back in October 2009. Well, now some soldiers say that violates their First Amendment rights.
NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty has the story.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: Multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan have taken a toll on soldiers. Just look at the rise in suicides and other stress-related disorders. The Army noticed that some soldiers fared better than others, and it wondered why. One reason, says Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum, is that people who are inclined toward spirituality seem to be more resilient.
Brigadier General RHONDA CORNUM (U.S. Army): Researchers have found that spiritual people have decreased odds of attempting suicide, and that spiritual fitness has a positive impact on quality of life, on coping, and on mental health.
HAGERTY: So, working with psychological researchers, the Army developed a survey that would assess a soldier's family relationships and his well-being -emotionally, socially and spiritually. Every soldier had to take it, including Justin Griffith, a sergeant at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Griffith, who describes himself as a foxhole atheist, says he grew angry as the computerized survey asked him to rank himself on statements like, I am a spiritual person, I often find comfort in my religion and spiritual beliefs.
Sergeant JUSTIN GRIFFITH (U.S. Army): The next question was equally shocking to me. In difficult times, I pray or meditate. I don't do those things, and I don't think that any of these questions have anything to do with how fit I am as a soldier.
HAGERTY: Griffith finished the survey, pressed submit, and in a few moments, he received an assessment. Spiritual fitness, it said, may be an area of difficulty. It continued:
Sgt. GRIFFITH: You may lack a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. At times, it is hard for you to make sense of what is happening to you and to others around you. You may not feel connected to something larger than yourself.
HAGERTY: Then it suggested that he take a long computerized training module to teach him about different forms of spirituality, including prayer, meditation and attending church. Griffith wondered, is the Army saying my atheism makes me unfit to serve?
Brig. Gen. CORNUM: There's nothing about this assessment that indicates you are fit or not fit to be a soldier.
HAGERTY: Brigadier General Cornum says the module only offers ideas for developing your spiritual side. It is not mandatory and it has no effect on your career.
Brig. Gen. CORNUM: There's no pass-fail, there's no - nothing happens. And no one sees it but the guy who takes it.
Mr. MIKEY WEINSTEIN (Founder, Military Religious Freedom Foundation): Tell it to the judge.
HAGERTY: Mikey Weinstein is a former Air Force lawyer who founded the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He says it's ridiculous to tell a soldier that a suggestion to buff up his or her spiritual muscles is voluntary. And he believes the term spirituality is a smokescreen for religion and particularly evangelical Christianity. He cites this part of the spirituality training module, which describes the meaning behind the flag-folding ceremony for Christians.
Unidentified Man: This represents an emblem of eternity and glorifies, in their eyes, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.
HAGERTY: Weinstein says the Army is promoting religion and creating a religious test for its soldiers, which is prohibited by the Constitution. He says he has 220 Army clients, some atheist, but the vast majority Christian, who are willing to sue to eliminate the spiritual fitness assessment.
Mr. WEINSTEIN: This is about a 1-inch putt if you're playing golf. This is clearly, blatantly unconstitutional and it has to stop.
HAGERTY: Robert Tuttle, a religion law expert at George Washington University Law School, disagrees.
Professor ROBERT TUTTLE (Law, George Washington University): If this were pushing people to engage in religious experience, that would be the slam-dunk that Mr. Weinstein talked about, but it's not.
HAGERTY: Tuttle has reviewed the material and says there are a couple of things, such as the flag-folding description, that are overtly religious. And, in fact, that portion was recently removed. But Tuttle says the Army is offering coping skills and overall it is not favoring one religion, or religion per se. And, remember, he says, courts give a lot of deference to the military.
Prof. TUTTLE: I think it would be a close case, but I'd be surprised if it were held unconstitutional.
HAGERTY: The Army may soon find out. Mikey Weinstein says if the government does not remove the spiritual fitness tool, his clients will sue next week.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Cowboys are back. Movie fans have ponied up over $100 million so far to see the Coen Brothers' "True Grit."
Earlier this week, a member of the ALL THINGS CONSIDERED staff made this embarrassed confession during our morning editorial meeting. He said he had seen "True Grit" and was surprised to find that he liked it. Surprised because as he admitted, he didn't think he liked westerns.
Needless to say he grew up a post-Gunsmoke, post-Rawhide, and post-Bonanza decade, and we reckoned that he wasn't alone. So for those of you who roll your eyes at the thought of a drunken saloon brawl or a ride into the sunset, we have invited Bob Mondello, our movie critic, to give us a little starter kit for the multiplex tenderfoot. Howdy, Bob.
BOB MONDELLO: Howdy.
SIEGEL: Let's start with some basics. What makes a western a western?
MONDELLO: Well, white hats, black hats, guns, frontier codes of honor, big sky country, I guess.
SIEGEL: There are a lot of westerns that have been made, and we asked you to pick a few. Let's start with the earliest pick on your list, it's from 1953, "Shane."
(Soundbite of movie, "Shane")
Mr. ALAN LADD (as Shane): I've heard about you.
Mr. JACK PALANCE (as Jack Wilson): What have you heard, Shane?
Mr. LADD: (as Shane): I've heard that you're a lowdown Yankee liar.
MONDELLO: Now, this is a classic western. You've got a good guy, Alan Ladd, and the bad guy there was Jack Palance. And it's about being pure in the way that America was pure. It's about going out there, and it's the frontier, and you're going to make everything right somehow.
SIEGEL: Now, a starter kit wouldn't be complete without at least one movie from the director who singlehandedly built the western from the ground up, John Ford, and his favorite star, John Wayne.
But the film that you've picked which was released just three years after "Shane," is not typical of Ford, Wayne, or the genre. Tell us the movie, "The Searchers."
MONDELLO: Right. "The Searchers" is complicated. It's about something more than just good and bad. The good guy, John Wayne, is an unrepentant racist in this. He hates the Comanches, and it's very much about how the settlers treated the Native Americans in that period. It's a very complicated, gorgeous, epic western.
SIEGEL: It's about gray hats.
MONDELLO: That's exactly right.
SIEGEL: Now, for the next pick, Bob, one which re-wrote the rules of the western a bit, and which can be summed up in one quick line.
(Soundbite of movie, "The Wild Bunch")
Mr. WILLIAM HOLDEN (as Pike Bishop): If they move, kill 'em.
SIEGEL: It's actor, William Holden, the ringleader of "The Wild Bunch" by director Sam Peckinpah. Why "The Wild Bunch"?
MONDELLO: Well, if the western can be about something in the wild West, it can be about other things, too. And Peckinpah decided to make this picture about violence. It is much more violent than the previous pictures. A lot of blood on the screen, a lot of slow motion violence. And he intended that as a comment on Vietnam. This came out in 1969, and so he meant this to be about other social issues, not just the ones from the wild West.
SIEGEL: And it was that vivid violence that turned off a lot of people, but that changed the rules of making a western.
MONDELLO: Absolutely.
SIEGEL: On your list, proving that you're not too predictable, you've added a comedy. One of my favorites, Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles," and this is not John Ford's western.
(Soundbite of movie, "Blazing Saddles")
UNKNOWN MAN: How about some more beans, Mr. Taggart?
Mr. SLIM PICKENS (as Mr. Taggart): I'd say you've had enough.
MONDELLO: I'd say he'd had enough, too. They'd all had enough. That's the campfire scene from "Blazing Saddles." I should warn people that this is definitely rated R. The subject matter and the language tend to be pretty adventuresome for the age. But it was a very, very funny picture.
SIEGEL: And finally, no list would be complete without at least one film from Clint Eastwood. Which one did you pick?
MONDELLO: Oh, now, this was hard because you want to pick one of the spaghetti westerns, but I finally decided that I had to pick something from a little later. It's as if the westerns stopped coming out in 1970, so I picked "Unforgiven."
(Soundbite of movie, "Unforgiven")
UNKNOWN MAN: I thought they was gonna get us. I was even scared a little, just for a minute. Was you ever scared in them days?
Mr. CLINT EASTWOOD (as Bill Munny): I can't remember. I was drunk most of the time.
MONDELLO: It is a magnificent western from 1992, really epic. It's about the old outlaws. This is the end of the era. A lot of people thought actually that it was a sort of a eulogy for the form. It ended up not being a eulogy for the form, because they made a whole lot of other pictures after it. It sort of inspired a western revival.
SIEGEL: That's a very interesting list you've compiled.
MONDELLO: And it's by no means complete, and I know that. I mean, this is five pictures. I've got about 20 on our website, npr.org. If you go there you can -maybe even somebody could give us their own starter kit for people who don't like westerns. I think if you look at these five pictures, though, and you still don't see anything you like, you really don't like westerns.
SIEGEL: Okay. Bob Mondello, thanks for providing us with a starter kit for liking westerns.
MONDELLO: Always a pleasure.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. If the event seems like ancient history to some, the Kennedy Library and the National Archives hope to make it a bit more accessible.
Today, they announced that they've put all of the 35th president's important speeches, papers and recordings online.
NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR: Go to www.jfklibrary.org and you can find the famous, like the president's inaugural address from January 20th, 1961.
President JOHN F. KENNEDY: And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.
NAYLOR: And there's the less well-known. Here's part of a 1962 TV and radio address on the admission of the first African-American to the University of Mississippi.
President JOHN F. KENNEDY: Mr. James Meredith is now in residence on the campus of the University of Mississippi. This has been accomplished thus far without the use of National Guard or other troops.
NAYLOR: The digital archive includes over 200,000 pages of speeches and notes, hundreds of reels of audiotape, and over a thousand recorded phone conversations.
JFK Library director Thomas Putnam says putting it online was a long and painstaking process.
Mr. THOMAS PUTNAM (Director, JFK Library): It's been a four-year project. It's very labor-intensive because all of these documents and photos weren't born digitally, so each one needs to be hand-scanned.
NAYLOR: The documents now online have been available at the brick and mortar JFK Library in Boston. But now anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can view firsthand drafts of Kennedy's inaugural, showing how the famous phrase, ask not what you can do for your country, evolved from, ask not what your country is going to do. Putnam's favorite find?
Mr. PUTNAM: I really do love the conversations he has during the middle of Cuban missile crisis. I mean, nothing can bring you closer to that moment about what he was trying to deal with and hearing, you know, even the laughter in the conversation between him and Eisenhower.
(Soundbite of conversation between Pres. John F. Kennedy and Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower)
President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Something may make these people shoot them off, I just don't believe this will.
President JOHN F. KENNEDY: Right.
President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: (Unintelligible) I'll say this, I'd want to keep my own people very alert.
President JOHN F. KENNEDY: Yeah. Well, hang on tight.
President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Yes, sir.
President JOHN F. KENNEDY: Thanks a lot, General.
President DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: All right.
NAYLOR: At a reception announcing the opening of the online archive, Caroline Kennedy said her father's example, words, and spirit are more important than ever.
Ms. CAROLINE KENNEDY: Using today's technology, we will be able to give today's generation access to the historical record and challenge them to answer my father's call to service to solve the problems of our own time.
NAYLOR: The president's daughter contributed to the archive. Her name is carefully printed in her then 5-year-old's handwriting on the back of one of Kennedy's papers.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Last Friday night, at a hockey rink in Norfolk, Virginia, 8-year-old Elizabeth Hughes took a microphone and walked out onto the ice. She was there to sing the national anthem.
Ms. ELIZABETH HUGHES: (Singing) Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light.
NORRIS: With that voice, clear as a bell, she made it through most of the song.
Ms. HUGHES: (Singing) ...gave proof through to the night...
NORRIS: The mic suddenly cut out.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: There was a cackle of laughter, but just one, because here's what happened next.
CROWD: (Singing) Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave.
NORRIS: Eight-year-old Elizabeth Hughes was surrounded by a symphony of voices. And she joins us now. What a beautiful voice you have and what a wonderful experience.
Ms. HUGHES: Thank you.
NORRIS: What do you remember thinking when that microphone cut out right in the middle of your big number?
Ms. HUGHES: I was upset because I didn't get to sing my high note and barely anybody probably could hear me. And I was just really disappointed.
NORRIS: Now, you were there to sing the national anthem, which is a pretty big honor. How did you get selected for this?
Ms. HUGHES: Well, who told me about this was my dad and he said, go try out for it. So I did. I auditioned for it. I sent it to the Admirals, and they picked me.
NORRIS: The Admirals are the hockey team down there.
Ms. HUGHES: Yeah.
NORRIS: Now, you had noted something for us at the beginning that you never got to finish the song and you never got to sing your high note. So I'm wondering if you want to sort of pick up where that microphone left off. And all of the people who were listening to NPR and ALL THINGS CONSIDERED right now, could hear you finish out the song. Do you mind doing that for us?
Ms. HUGHES: Yes. Well, no, I don't mind.
NORRIS: OK. Good. I'm glad that you don't mind. Do you need to warm up or anything? Or can you launch right into it?
Ms. HUGHES: I just have to do my, like, it's a pitch pipe. One second.
NORRIS: OK.
(Soundbite of pitch pipe)
Ms. HUGHES: (Singing) Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o'r the land of the free and the home of the brave.
(Soundbite of applause)
Ms. HUGHES: Thank you.
NORRIS: I wish you could hear the applause of millions. Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Ms. HUGHES: Thank you.
NORRIS: That was 8-year-old Elizabeth Hughes. She's already a beautiful singer and she is clearly on her way. Elizabeth, thank you very much.
Ms. HUGHES: You're welcome.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
We begin this hour with the story of a powerful new genetic test. It can search for genetic mutations linked to about 450 childhood diseases. Severe genetic illnesses in children are rare, but they account for about a fifth of all infant deaths in the U.S. This week, scientists announced the new test, which would be inexpensive and they hope, available to all would-be parents. In a few minutes we'll address some ethical questions this raises.
But, first, Nell Greenfieldboyce reports on this test and the family that inspired it.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Craig Benson says that a few years ago, he and his wife, Charlotte, noticed a change in their daughter, who was then five years old. Christiane was holding books closer to her face and was sitting closer to the TV.
Mr. CRAIG BENSON: Charlotte and I thought that, well, you know, she needs glasses. So we set up an appointment with an optometrist.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: That first appointment eventually led to a terrible diagnosis: Batten disease.
Mr. BENSON: Batten disease is a very rare genetic neurodegenerative disorder that's caused by both her mom and I carry a gene mutation, a single gene mutation.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: They hadn't known that, of course. They'd never even heard of Batten disease. It's progressive and fatal. A child develops vision loss, seizures, memory problems.
Mr. BENSON: And the last few years are, you know, for the most part, you know, there's really no function to speak of at all. It's, you know, a difficult thing, obviously, to watch any child experience.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Now, in addition to being a father, Craig Benson is an executive with a biotechnology company in Austin, Texas. Soon after his daughter was diagnosed, he and his colleagues were discussing the fact that one devastating childhood disease, Tay-Sachs, has been virtually eliminated in people with Eastern European Jewish ancestry. This has been done by offering screening tests to would-be parents. If both parents carry the Tay-Sachs mutation, they can take steps so that they won't have a baby with this disease.
Mr. BENSON: Man, we thought, you know, that's a great idea and a great strategy, why is that not more broadly applied?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: So the executives went to Stephen�Kingsmore. He's a researcher who was then at a nonprofit called the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They asked him, would it be possible for you to make an affordable test that could screen all prospective parents for numerous genetic diseases? He said yes.
And this week, in the journal Science Translational Medicine, Kingsmore's team describes that test. For less than $400, it can check a person's DNA for all mutations in genes related to nearly 450 severe childhood diseases. And Kingsmore says that's just the beginning.
Mr. STEPHEN KINGSMORE (President, National Center for Genome Resources): Over the next six months we'll be taking the number up to 580 conditions, at which point we'll have represented just about every childhood disease that's severe enough to merit inclusion.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He says this test is relevant to everyone thinking of having a child, because their research shows it's common for people to carry mutations.
Mr. KINGSMORE: On average, we find that each of us carries two or three mutations that could cause one of these severe childhood diseases.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: If, that is, we were unlucky enough to be having a baby with someone who just happened to be carrying a mutation for that same rare disease.
Laird Jackson thinks this new test raises important issues. He's an expert in prenatal genetic testing at Drexel University.
Professor LAIRD JACKSON (Obstetrics and Gynecology, Drexel University): It's saying that everybody has something to think about here and if testing becomes available, will have something to decide about.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: This new test could become widely available soon. Benson wants to offer it through a nonprofit he started, the Beyond Batten Disease Foundation, so that doctors could offer screening to everyone.
Mr. BENSON: Yeah, I don't know that we've really sat down and contemplated all of the impact that this test and this idea, you know, might have.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: He just hopes it means other families won't have his family's experience - getting blindsinded by a devastating disease that they'd never even heard of.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Now we're going to discuss some of the practical and ethical questions raised by this degree of genetic screening. I spoke earlier today with Dr. Jeffrey Botkin. He's a bioethicist and professor of genetics and pediatrics at the University of Utah. He says the test poses challenges for would-be parents who find they are both carriers of the same genetic mutations.
Dr. JEFFREY BOTKIN (Genetics and Pediatrics, University of Utah): So the initial question would be how to deal with this information as it flows. And one of the things that is always a concern from an ethical perspective is making sure people accurately understand that information.
We have a history from the 1970s in which sickle cell screening was conducted in the population. And there was quite a bit of misunderstanding about carrier status. People misunderstand that terminology. They may think that they have the disease and that may create problems with their own emotional reaction, as well as the possibility of discrimination.
NORRIS: Within the framework of the information that's already available through testing, in your experience, what do couples who discover an increased risk of having a child with a genetic disease generally do with that information? What kinds of options are available to them?
Dr. BOTKIN: Of course for couples who find that they are at risk prior to pregnancy, they have a large number of choices. Adoption might well be a choice, egg donation or sperm donation would be a choice. They may choose to proceed with becoming pregnant and then evaluate that pregnancy for whether the fetus is affected and if so, then make a decision about whether to terminate that pregnancy or not. If testing is conducted once pregnancy has begun, then, of course, the choices are much more limited.
NORRIS: Now, some people are already saying this should raise alarms because it could lead more abortions. It could lead to the stigmatization of certain diseases or parents who are carriers for those diseases. On the other side, could you also argue that this perhaps could lead parents to better prepare for a child that might have special needs?
Dr. BOTKIN: Oh, absolutely. And I think that that would be logical - a flow of information to folks who'd want to make decisions, understanding that the child was going to be affected, about how best to care for that child, perhaps what hospital would be best to deliver that child. And to make sure that the appropriate experts were on hand to deal with the nature of that condition.
NORRIS: Are doctors prepared to handle these kinds of discussions?
Dr. BOTKIN: I would say physicians are not prepared to handle this type of discussion at this point. And what the literature tends to show is that there's less than ideal level of conversation around the carrier testing and prenatal testing that is already available.
NORRIS: Parents hope and pray for healthy children. And they might do whatever they can to ensure that that happens. I'm just wondering if this moves the country potentially into a very uncomfortable zone. You've been talking about genetics, but on a societal level, does this raise the whole question of eugenics?
Dr. BOTKIN: Well, it certainly does to some extent. And I think the focus of this paper is on serious childhood conditions. And that's the sort of testing that's been less controversial than other sorts of testing or other sorts of reasons to terminate a pregnancy.
But we would have to wonder whether opening the door to this line of testing might then invite next steps which would be testing for conditions that were less severe or potentially for traits that really were not health-related traits at all.
NORRIS: Dr. Jeffrey Botkin, thank you very much.
Dr. BOTKIN: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: Dr. Jeffrey Botkin is a pediatrician and a bioethicist at the University of Utah.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Speeches like the one President Obama gave last night at the memorial service in Tucson can be turning points for a president. While it's too early to tell if that's the case for Mr. Obama, the early assessments are already rolling in.
NPR's Mara Liasson reports.
MARA LIASSON: For a man elected on a promise to elevate the tone of political discourse, the memorial service for the Tucson shooting victims presented an opportunity and President Obama took it.
President BARACK OBAMA: And if, as has been discussed in recent days, their death helps usher in more civility in our public discourse, let us remember, it is not because a simple lack of civility caused this tragedy, it did not. But, rather, because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make them proud.
LIASSON: The president has struggled to transcend the partisan divide and to unify Americans with different points of view. But last night he succeeded on one important level - there was wide agreement that he gave a very good speech.
Mr. DAN SCHNUR (Director, Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics): I think fair-minded observers of both parties would give the president very high marks for his speech.
LIASSON: That's former Republican operative Dan Schnur, now the director of the Jesse Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.
One challenge for the president last night was adjusting to the mostly college-age crowd who seemed more in the mood for a pep rally style celebration of life than a traditional memorial service. They repeatedly interrupted the somber speech the president had written.
Pres. OBAMA: We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another, that's entirely up to us.
(Soundbite of applause)
Pres. OBAMA: And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
LIASSON: Michael Waldman is a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.
Mr. MICHAEL WALDMAN (Former Speechwriter, President Bill Clinton): He was in this unusual setting with a boisterous crowd and he found a way to make it work. It came off as challenging and even a bit jarring to have the audience applauding. But it didn't seem inappropriate. It was a very American, rambunctious setting. And it wasn't a partisan rally. It was - I got the sense a community feeling very besieged wanting to let off some steam.
LIASSON: The speech had echoes of Mr. Obama's maiden speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004, when he dismissed the idea of the country as a collection of red states and blue states.
Pres. OBAMA: We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
LIASSON: This is what the president's advisers have been trying to accomplish -getting Mr. Obama back to what they call first principles.
Michael Waldman.
Mr. WALDMAN: The message he gave last night, in a way it was a reintroduction of himself to the public of what people liked about him, what inspired them so much. So, that will be a renewed source of strength for him.
LIASSON: It already has been. An average of polls shows that for the first time since July, the president's approval rating is above water. That is, more people approve of him now than disapprove. This is a trend that started a while ago, but the rampage in Tucson is the kind of event that can be a turning point, says Dan Schnur.
Mr. SCHNUR: Every president starts his term with a very large window of opportunity to talk to the voters. And over the course of his term in office, that window gradually shrinks. What these type of events do is they expand that window of opportunity outward again. And it gives the president a broader opportunity to talk with those voters. What comes next I think will ultimately determine how the speech is viewed in years ahead.
LIASSON: And fortuitously for President Obama, he will get another chance very soon to build on the themes in the Tucson speech. The State of the Union address, the highest profile event in a president's year is right around the corner, just 12 days from today.
Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
In Tucson today, two events that show the two sides of a story that has developed there: at Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton Catholic Church, a funeral. Family and friends escorted the small brown casket of 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green into the sanctuary. Green's funeral is the first of six that will take place in the coming days.
SIEGEL: A very different scene is playing out just down the highway at the University Medical Center. Doctors treating Representative Gabrielle Giffords say her progress is exceptional. Despite being shot through the head on Saturday, doctors say she is able to move her arms and legs on both sides of her body.
And as NPR's Jeff Brady reports, this morning, the thing they were still most excited about was that last night she opened her eyes on her own.
JEFF BRADY: Neurosurgeon Michael Lemole says he was in the room when fellow members of Congress visited Giffords last night.
Dr. MICHAEL LEMOLE (Chief of Neurosurgery, University Medical Center): I think it was a combination, perhaps, of the unexpected but familiar that really prompted her to open her eyes and look around.
BRADY: New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was among those in Giffords' hospital room. She relayed her experience while flying back to Washington on Air Force One.
Senator KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND (Democrat, New York): She finally opens her eyes, and you can tell she was, like, desperately trying to focus, and it took enormous strength from her. And Mark just can't believe it. I mean, he is so happy, and we're crying because we're witnessing something that we never imagined would happen in front of us.
BRADY: Dr. Lemole says now Giffords is opening her eyes consistently, sometimes for 10 to 15 minutes at a time, and often in reaction to something happening in the room, like the television being on.
Dr. LEMOLE: Without getting too technical, we have a coma grading scale that we apply to all head injury patients, and this does bump her up several points on that scale, just the ability to open your eyes spontaneously and become aware of your surroundings. So, yes, it is a significant move forward.
BRADY: Lemole says brain swelling is less of a concern now. At this point, doctors are looking for signs of potential problems like blood clots and pneumonia that can happen to anyone in an intensive care unit.
Dr. Peter Rhee says they've started moving Giffords around a bit.
Dr. PETER RHEE (Medical Director, Trauma and Critical Care, University Medical Center): Today, we're doing very aggressive physical therapy with her, and we actually got her out of bed and dangling on the side of the bed as well. So we're very happy about this process, and so far, it seems like everything is going forward without any setbacks at this position.
BRADY: Rhee says Giffords needs a lot of assistance to do this, but they hope to have her sitting up in a chair soon. The next step is removing the breathing tube.
Dr. RHEE: She still has a tube in her throat. She's still on the machine. But even though she's on the machine, the machine is not pushing air in. She's just breathing on her own with the warm humidified air that's going in there with very little support.
BRADY: At times during today's briefing, Drs. Rhee and Lemole were almost giddy. And in undoctor-like fashion, Lemole said Giffords' progress may be partially attributable to outside forces.
Dr. LEMOLE: Miracles happen every day. And in medicine, we like to very much attribute them to either what we do or others do around us. But a lot of medicine is outside of our control, and we're wise to acknowledge miracles.
BRADY: Lemole says it's still not clear what Giffords' recovery will look like eventually. But with the progress she's made so far, he says there's a wide range of possibilities: from needing significant help to get around her home to being out in the world and functional.
While Giffords is the only shooting victim left at University Medical Center in critical condition, four other patients are still receiving care there. They are in fair condition. The hospital won't release specific information about them, but one of the patients was expected to be discharged today.
Jeff Brady, NPR News, Tucson.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Though she certainly never applied for membership, Gabrielle Giffords is now a member of a very small club: people who have survived a direct gunshot wound to the brain. Every wound is different, and the path to survival or recovery differs from one person to the next. But some people do make it through and manage to live fairly normal lives.
Jay Gordon is one of those people. Twenty-four years ago, he was shot in the head. He walked into an auto-parts store and interrupted a robbery in progress. And Jay Gordon joins us now in the studio to talk about his road to recovery.
So glad you could come in.
Mr. JAY GORDON (Chief of Litigation, Maritime Administration, Department of Transportation): Well, thank you for inviting me.
NORRIS: Do you mind if we begin with that moment, all those years ago, when you walked into that store? What happened?
Mr. GORDON: Well, I walked into an auto-parts store. I knew the salesman there. I saw him at the counters. There was somebody between me and the guy, and he turned. He had a gun, and he told me to go behind the counter with the other people - I think there was another employee there as well. And he was holding a gun on us. He wanted what was in the cash register, and then suddenly, I don't remember being shot. Suddenly, I was falling to the floor. I thought I had fainted.
I remember being - feeling good that I wasn't shaking in my boots, and then, I said, oh, you're fainting. I was on the floor, and people started to tear my shirt. And they said you've been shot. Now, I can't say that I remember things very clearly about that, because when I was shot, it was sort of like my mind went into like a cave. And I was way in the back. It was like things were far distant. I remember hearing the ambulance come. I remember people talking to me, but I remember being someplace in my mind that I had never been before.
NORRIS: So hearing things but feeling like you're not actually in the moment.
Mr. GORDON: Right. Yeah. I remember being in the hospital. I must have said something to them because they called my wife. And my wife came down, and I was lying on a gurney there. But it was - but I don't - I mean, I don't recollect the time sense of it. Things just happened very fast. I remember talking to my wife, and this is before the operation.
NORRIS: What happened in surgery? Because in the case of Gabrielle Giffords, doctors have said that the fact that the bullet exited was good news for her, if we could call it that, because it meant that the bullet didn't explode inside her brain. In your case, did the bullet actually leave your body?
Mr. GORDON: No. I still have fragments in my brain. They told me the bullet shattered, and there were pieces of my brain. They removed what they could, but in my case, the bullet did not pass through. It shattered in my skull.
NORRIS: What is the process of recovery like on the other side of brain surgery where they actually literally have to take a piece of your skull out to access your brain - in your case, remove a bullet?
Mr. GORDON: Well, in my case, I had a neurological exam, and I also had - I went to a therapist who assessed me for cognitive functions. And I mean, I haven't had really any real problems.
NORRIS: So you didn't have to go through speech therapy, physical therapy? Did you lose any movement of your, you know, ability to move your arms or your legs?
Mr. GORDON: No, not - I mean, I did a certain amount of exercise, but no more than anyone would do coming out of a hospital who hadn't done exercise for a while.
NORRIS: That's just miraculous.
Mr. GORDON: Yeah. Well, I'm very fortunate to not have any - knock on wood -thus far, not have any problems.
NORRIS: Listening to you, it's clear that the injury that you suffered all those years ago is very different than the wound that Congresswoman Giffords is recovering from right now. But I'm wondering if based on your own experience, if you have any kind of advice that you might offer to her family or to people who will be her side during recovery?
Mr. GORDON: Well, I wouldn't presume to give them advice. I would just say that, for me, the love that I got from my family, my wife and my friends was very important to me in my - as my recovery. I would say doing that would be the best that one could do, you know, recognizing that she'll need patience and understanding as she goes forward.
NORRIS: Well, Jay Gordon, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us.
Mr. GORDON: Well, you're welcome.
NORRIS: All the best to you and all the best to your family.
Mr. GORDON: Well, thank you.
NORRIS: Jay Gordon is the chief of litigation at the Maritime Administration. He was talking to us about a gunshot wound he survived back in 1986.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In Southern California, a U.S. Border Patrol agent has been charged with harboring undocumented immigrants in his home and lying about it. Among the people authorities claim he harbored was his own father.
From member station KPBS in San Diego, Amita Sharma reports.
AMITA SHARMA: Until this week, Marco Gerardo Manzano, Jr. lived on a street called Shooting Star Drive in the border community of San Ysidro. For the last three months, his father, Marco Gerardo Manzano, Sr., was also reportedly seen working in the yard at the home, and coming and going daily.
It's not unusual for a father to visit his son for an extended stay, except in this case the dad is a deported felon, and the son is a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
Mr. PETER NUNEZ: (Former U.S. Attorney, San Diego): There certainly have been Border Patrol agents in the past that have been involved in various corrupt activities.
SHARMA: Peter Nunez is a former U.S. attorney in San Diego.
Mr. NUNEZ: But obviously in this case, with the agent covering for his father, and actually harboring him apparently, it's more than ironic that the guy hired to enforce immigration laws is violating those same laws.
SHARMA: Manzano, Sr., was first deported from the U.S. to Mexico in 2007, but later that year he resurfaced in the U.S., was convicted for selling marijuana and deported again. Court papers say Manzano, Jr. told federal investigators last month he knew his dad was a convict who had been deported, but he didn't know where his father was.
Later that month, according to U.S. wiretaps, Manzano, Sr. was heard on the telephone saying his son had informed him that quote, "they were looking for him." Nunez says there could have been an honorable way out for the son.
Mr. NUNEZ: The son should have told his father, look at, you know, I cannot help you, and, in fact, I'm obligated to report you if I know that you are here in the country. So don't put me in that situation. Don't make me choose between my loyalty to you and my loyalty to my oath as a law enforcement officer.
SHARMA: Manzano's alleged choice is a crude reminder of what immigration reform activist Christian Ramirez believes are flawed policies.
Mr. CHRISTIAN RAMIREZ (Immigration Reform Activist): It reflects the fact that our immigration policies are out of touch with the reality of what it is to live in the U.S.-Mexico border. Our immigration policy is designed to split families apart. It's designed to pit family members against family members.
SHARMA: Federal prosecutors told a judge in court yesterday that Manzano, Jr. may have done more than help his father. Investigators found an underground room in the Border Patrol agent's home.
Mr. DARRELL FOXWORTH: (Spokesman FBI, San Diego): Well, it does draw some concerns as far as what the room was going to be used for.
SHARMA: Darrell Foxworth is a spokesman for the FBI in San Diego.
Mr. FOXWORTH: What comes to mind most often in criminal investigations, that it could be used to conceal drugs, people, or other contraband.
SHARMA: Federal agents did discover another man who had previously been deported hiding inside that room. They also found a couple ounces of methamphetamine in the house, as well as drug packing materials.
Manzano, Jr. pleaded not guilty in court yesterday to charges he aided and abetted illegal immigrants and lied to a federal officer. His father remains a fugitive.
For NPR News, I'm Amita Sharma in San Diego.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely of Duke University talks with us here on occasion about how we behave irrationally. And Dan, you say a word that illustrates our lack of reason is, natural, and how we react to the word natural.
Mr. DAN ARIELY (Behavioral Economist, Duke University): Yeah. So first of all, it's kind of interesting what is really natural. And, you know, recently there's been all kinds of the news about people who run with shoes with no soles, and people who try to go back to the environment and all kinds of things.
And this kind of made me wonder about what - what is it, why do people think that running with shoes without soles is more logical. I actually met one of those guys, and I said, what about chairs? I said, well, why do you sit on a chair, wouldn't you be better on the rock?
Because he said, you know, the cavemen ran without soles, you know, why wouldnt we do the same thing.
SIEGEL: Natural floor - natural seating is what you were proposing, yeah.
Mr. ARIELY: That's right. So we tried to look at this. We went to the hospital and we asked people to make choices between all kinds of medications. And from time to time we would write this medication, you have two statins to reduce your cholesterol, this one is natural. We describe it in the same way, we just added the word natural.
The question is what would add this word do, what - how people process this information differently, and a few interesting things happened. First of all, people don't think in general that when medication is natural it's more effective. They don't think it's more powerful. They don't think it attacks the disease in a more directed way. They don't think any of this works.
But what they do thing is that it has less side effects, particularly in the long term. And we basically think of this as the caveman theory. What people do, is we think that our body is naturally attuned to the caveman era.
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
Mr. ARIELY: And during that time everything was kind of moving in harmony, and the medications from that time, the natural medication, fit with everything with our body, with the main disease, but also they have no unintended consequences.
They don't think that natural is more effective. What they think is a synthetic has more side effects, particularly long-term side effects.
SIEGEL: And which we're talking about a distinction between what's natural and synthetic, which is quite often really on the bubble here. I mean, it's very hard to tell what some things are, whether natural or synthetic.
Mr. ARIELY: Very hard to tell. And, you know, I took interferons for a long time which is a medication that is natural but they don't present it as one. You can think about insulin, is it synthetic or natural? There's lots of stuff. And it's actually at the discretion of the drug manufacturer about how they want to describe it.
SIEGEL: And you think if I'm selling a drug, calling it natural is an advantage.
Mr. ARIELY: I think you will do wonders for the expectations about side effects.
SIEGEL: Okay. Dan Ariely, thank you very much for talking with us once again.
Mr. ARIELY: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: Behavioral economist Dan Ariely is the author of "The Upside of Irrationality," and he appears here from time to time to talk about our irrational behavior.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
So what would it actually take to change the tax code? Joining us to talk about that is William Gale, who is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-director of the Tax Policy Center there.
Welcome.
Mr. WILLIAM GALE (Co-Director, Tax Policy Center, Brookings Institution): Hi.
SIEGEL: As we just heard in Scott Horsley's story, in this case, special interests means us. What does that say about the prospects for reforming the tax code?
Mr. GALE: Any hope for reforming the tax code is going to be very difficult. We're going to have to move step by step. Every step is going to be hard. The reason is that it creates winners and losers, and the losers will object, while the winners happily take their gains. In the past, we paid off the losers, but we can't afford to do that right now.
So tax reform is going to be difficult. Even aside from the politics of the House and the Senate, simply reforming the system in a way that doesn't lose revenue will turn out to be a difficult task.
SIEGEL: You're saying it's a tough piece of accounting, of economics, even before you get to the politics of the matter.
Mr. GALE: Yes, even if you just sat down 10 experts in the room and said, reform the tax system, they would largely agree on the general way to reform the system. But when it came down to particular groups, they might have different opinions.
SIEGEL: There's this question of, should you have a system that simply has some flat tax rates and that's what you pay, or should you have all of these tax expenditures that Scott Horsley was reporting on just now.
I added up, according to the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, what are the - roughly the cost we would pay over the years from 2010 to 2014 on encouraging health care - people being insured, either publicly or privately -homeownership through deducting mortgage interest or property taxes, and secure retirement - how much we exclude in that regard.
That's huge. I mean, these three positive values that we have come up to, over five years, two and a half trillion dollars or more.
Mr. GALE: Yes, there's enormous money in tax expenditures and in those subsidies. And the way to think about that is tax expenditures are really spending that's in the tax code. And so just as spending items like Social Security and Medicare are central to what people think the government does, spending items like the mortgage interest deduction, the tax treatment of health insurance, the deductibility of charitable contributions are also central to the notion of the way many Americans think government ought to interact.
All of those assumptions are going to have to be reexamined for the simple reason that we cannot afford the sum total of all the subsidies we have given.
SIEGEL: Is there a tax expenditure, tax loophole out there that would have, say, the mythic stature that the oil depletion allowance used to have decades ago - some special interest that's making hundreds of billions of dollars off favorable treatment?
Mr. GALE: I think we had our heyday of targeted tax expenditures in the late '70s and the early '80s in the chinchilla farms and stuff like that, largely got wiped out in 1986. That's actually bad news 'cause it means the tax expenditures that are left now are really sort of the core social goals that government often pursues.
Nevertheless, those expenditures are regressive. That is, they largely help high-income households at the expense of low-income households. And it may well be that we need to rethink the social contract not just on the spending side but on the tax side too.
SIEGEL: Do you think there's some amount of federal income tax for those in the higher brackets that you could almost get for free out of the public if it meant that you didn't have to retain a tax preparer and pay a couple of thousand dollars to have your taxes done by somebody else?
Mr. GALE: Well, you know, it's interesting. The one thing that people complain about consistently is that the tax system is too complicated. But if you ask people, how much more would you pay in taxes in order to have your taxes be simple? The answer is: Not very much. That sort of tells you why our taxes are complicated. Everybody wants their own particular subsidy. No one is willing to give it up in exchange for a simpler tax system.
SIEGEL: Bill Gale, thanks for talking with us.
Mr. GALE: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That's William Gale, who is co-director of the Tax Policy Center at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Now, a case of faith and zoning. In Hartford, Connecticut, an Orthodox Jewish group wants to run a religious center for nearby university students. Neighbors don't want it there, and the city wants it shut down.
As Jeff Cohen from member station WNPR reports, the argument could be decided by a relatively new federal law, one that offers some protection for religious groups.
JEFF COHEN: Bloomfield Avenue is studded by huge homes from the early 1900s and beyond. It's also a busy street linking the city of Hartford with its suburban neighbors. And a few steps from here are a private school, a Unitarian church, the University of Hartford, and this new neighbor - a Chabad house, a place for Jewish university students to pray, celebrate and learn.
Rabbi Yosef Kulek says he doesn't want to be disruptive.
Rabbi YOSEF KULEK: I would estimate that this neighbor is about 75, a hundred feet away, give or take. I would think that whatever happens, whatever we do, I think we are good, quiet neighbors.
COHEN: Not if you ask the neighbors.
Kathleen Sullivan and her husband don't want to be next to a student center -Jewish or otherwise. It doesn't have to be Animal House to be a problem. Sullivan says even the infrequent, run-of-the-mill college student gatherings stick out in a residential neighborhood.
Ms. KATHLEEN SULLIVAN: They're kids. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of singing and dancing and screaming, and that's a big change from what we're used to.
COHEN: They and neighbor Stu Cooper also don't like the suggestion that to be against the Chabad house is to be against Jews.
Mr. STU COOPER: I am Jewish, and I am certainly not anti-Semitic. And this is strictly a zoning issue. It is not a religious issue.
COHEN: But it's a legal issue. The city of Hartford says local zoning doesn't permit the Chabad house. And the case is in federal court, where Chabad is arguing that the city wants to keep it out because of its religion.
To do that, Chabad is using a 10-year-old federal law called the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act. The law was designed to overcome religious discrimination in local zoning.
Marc Stern is associate general counsel for American Jewish Committee. He helped write the law and says it's been useful for small, less established religious groups moving into old, well-established communities.
Mr. MARC STERN (Associate General Counsel, American Jewish Committee): It's why Lubavitcher Chabad is so often in court, why Pentacostalist churches are so often in court, because these are relatively new churches on the American scene and certainly in the suburbs. And it's they who are trying to break the status quo, and they who are excluded by the zoning laws, not the churches who have been there for 150 years.
COHEN: And Stern says the law has worked, making it easier for houses of worship to open where they weren't before.
But Marci Hamilton says the law ignores the concerns of neighbors who don't want to live next to a church or a church dance hall or anything like them. Hamilton teaches at the Cardozo School of Law.
Professor MARCI HAMILTON (Cardozo School of Law): It never occurred to anybody in the process that homeowners were going to get slammed by inappropriate uses next door to their homes.
COHEN: And she says this creates real animosity.
Prof. HAMILTON: Because the homeowners will repeatedly say: We are not objecting because of your religion. We're objecting because of your dance hall. And the religious group comes back and says: But this is our religious mission.
Rabbi JOSEPH GOPIN: We see our mission as to educate our youth about their heritage, about their religion, about Jewish philosophy.
COHEN: Chabad leader Rabbi Joseph Gopin says to do that means being near the university students it serves.
As for the federal law that prohibits religious discrimination in local zoning, it has survived numerous challenges in court.
For NPR News, I'm Jeff Cohen in Hartford.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Alaska is a magnificent place full of natural beauty. It's also a vast unforgiving landscape full of places where humans can find themselves isolated and lonely. In short, it is the perfect setting for a novel.
Alan Cheuse has this review of "Caribou Island" from writer David Vann.
ALAN CHEUSE: The first fall storm, blasts of wind and rain. A 30-degree drop in temperature, the sky gone dark, a malevolence, a beast physical and intent.
Here in David Vann's Alaska, everything is growing colder by the day, by the hour.
At the center of this turbulent story about the disintegration and death of love stands an isolated island in the center of a large Alaskan lake. Here, as the season turns toward winter, a husband and wife, Gary and Irene, have hauled logs from the far shore to build a cabin, a shelter for the rest of their lives, or so Gary sees it.
An emotionally isolated scholar of Old English who came to Alaska with Irene decades ago, this bitter-minded husband recites ancient epics into the rising wind, while hammering logs together badly to make this island home. He's a dark soul, a champion of regret, the novelist calls him.
Irene has a troubled mind. As a young girl, she came home from school to find her mother hanging by the neck, and that dark image became the signature of the rest of her life. The remorse of her Alaskan exile and the way it cuts into the last days of her marriage becomes the main narrative line of this novel.
Despite multiple story lines, which, like those logs Gary hauls out to the island for his cabin, appear somewhat badly nailed together, "Caribou Island" builds to an horrific climax and stands as an engrossing and disturbing work of art.
SIEGEL: David Vann is the author of "Caribou Island." Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
We're going to return now to a Marine family we've met before. Lance Corporal Josh Apsey is a member of the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marines, known as America's Battalion. We followed these Marines throughout 2009 when they spent six months in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. We also met many of their families, including Apsey's parents. They worried about their son - all the time - waiting for the phone to ring. Halfway through that deployment, our reporter happened to be visiting when he called.
M: Hey, Josh. How you doing, son? I'm doing great. It's great to hear from you. Hey, listen, I know your mom wants to talk to you. And I love you and I miss you, and I just can't wait to see you, son.
SIEGEL: Catherine Welch, with member station WRNI, caught up with the Apsey family just before he was due to leave.
CATHERINE WELCH: This is one of the last times Josh Apsey will sit down for dinner with his parents before heading back to Afghanistan. Vicki Apsey buzzes around the kitchen. She's making meatloaf and stir-fried brussel sprouts.
M: Most people don't like brussel spouts, but got a good recipe here so we'll give it a shot.
WELCH: Last time, a Bible his mom gave him was his most treasured possession. This time, he's leaving it behind. It's full of sand from Afghanistan and now, his mom will turn to it for comfort. Josh is bringing the Kindle he got for Christmas.
SIEGEL: I'm definitely stocking that up with lots of books.
WELCH: And he'll return to war with a keepsake from his granddad.
SIEGEL: This is a four-leaf clover he found when he was with the Army back in '58. And he gave it to me, and I've kept it in my wallet ever since.
WELCH: Knowing what to bring is nothing compared to what he learned on the battlefield, in one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan.
SIEGEL: When we first landed last year, it was kind of a rush - you know, all that adrenaline - and then it was kind of a surprise to actually land there on the ground and to have rounds coming at me. As soon as we land, I'm pretty confident I'll know exactly what I have to do, and I'll be the first one to move, and I can help anyone else who's new to it.
WELCH: How did you deal with it?
SIEGEL: I'm not going to lie, there was a period when I went internal and said, you know, I don't necessarily need help from the outside. I don't need to speak to my family about, you know, what's going on.
WELCH: Mostly because he wasn't sure himself what was happening.
SIEGEL: You might just find yourself - just sitting there, staring off into space, thinking about something that maybe took place a few months before, and just thinking about how you could have done things differently.
WELCH: Josh was 18 years old he left for that first deployment. He's 20 now and has a wife, Carolyn. The couple sat next to each other at the dinner table. His father, Tom, said grace.
M: Lord, again, we just thank you for this opportunity to be together tonight.
WELCH: Have you guys had that talk?
SIEGEL: Not really. She is kind of putting it off.
M: I'm putting him off, yeah.
SIEGEL: We'll probably have it here soon.
M: Yeah. The closer it comes.
WELCH: All through the conversation, Josh's father sat quietly at the head of the table. He understands that his role will be different on this deployment, too.
M: I think it's going to be hard, and I think it's going to be hard because of our new family member in Carolyn, and helping her get through it. But I think all three of us together, you know, with a lot of prayer and a lot of support, it's going to even it out.
WELCH: For NPR News, I'm Catherine Welch.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
NPR's Peter Kenyon reports from Beirut.
PETER KENYON: Faris Souhaid says Hezbollah's sponsors, Syria and Iran, don't want to see the Hezbollah's image tarnished, and the government collapsed because they were unable to persuade Saad Hariri to denounce the tribunal looking into the murder of his father.
SIEGEL: Justice, it's a new concept in the Middle East. In this part of the world, we kill and if you are powerful there is no justice for you. It's the first time after the civil war in Lebanon that we had the interest of the international community, to assure an international tribunal for Lebanon and for Lebanese. We are supporting justice.
KENYON: Paul Salem, with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says should Hezbollah actually get a hand on the reins of power, Washington may have to revisit some of its policies, including an estimated $100 million a year in aid to the Lebanese army.
D: If this becomes a government very much influenced by Hezbollah and Syria and Iran and other allies here, it will be very difficult for the U.S. Congress and U.S. administration to maintain that level of support.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
KENYON: With no signs of violence to date, for most Lebanese, it's been business as usual. In Beirut's bustling Hamra neighborhood, 72-year-old Sunni, Abu Adnan, says underneath their casual exterior, however, people are definitely worried.
NORRIS: (Through Translator) For us, we really want the Americans to make a move. Especially if it's a Hezbollah government - that would be like living under the Nazis. We don't know why the Americans aren't acting.
KENYON: Former airline pilot Sam Awad, however, says he knows that for Washington, the international tribunal is the most important thing. But he hopes someone considers what a new round of violence would do to people here.
NORRIS: I believe in justice. I believe that the international courts must prevail. But we have to take into consideration the social fabric of Lebanon. We have to understand that a new power has risen in Lebanon, which is the Shia power, and they could make life hell.
KENYON: Peter Kenyon, NPR News, Beirut.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Here's Chana Joffe-Walt from our Planet Money Team.
CHANA JOFFE: Let's first address the obvious question here. The Euro Zone is not doing well. Greece needed a bailout, then Ireland. Now, it's looking like Portugal might too. So doesn't that worry Estonians? The most common Estonian response I get to this question is a shrug.
TETER BORK: Ah, I don't mind.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
JOFFE: This is Teter Bork. He says the benefits far outweigh the current Euro crisis. Joining the Euro will mostly likely mean more foreign investment for Estonia, and mostly, Bork says, it's a huge symbol. Estonia has arrived, and it's part of Europe.
BORK: It's the last proof that we're accepted as a full member.
JOFFE: Why do you care about being a full member?
BORK: It probably comes from the past of being a very full member of Soviet Union.
JOFFE: Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. And you know what everyone remembers about that moment? Money. Beautiful Estonian kroons.
MIHKEL RAUD: They were our own money.
JOFFE: This is Mihkel Raud. He's a writer and one of the more severe judges on "Estonian Idol."
RAUD: The only money that I have seen in my life was the Russian rubles, which looked ugly and looked very Soviet and Bolshevik. When you saw your first notes of national currency, that's probably the very moment when I realized that, hey, we are living in an independent country.
JOFFE: Here's Hando Sinsalu, a business owner.
HANDO SINSALU: I even remember that my first purchase for kroons was actually a hamburger.
JOFFE: Ullar Jaaksoo owns a software company and told me he wants to buy something that he could hand his grandkids in 30 years and say, I bought this with our own money, Estonian currency.
ULLAR JAAKSOO: I was thinking almost two weeks what should be my last purchase with the Estonian kroon?
JOFFE: He thought and thought, and finally just a few days ago he decided.
JAAKSOO: And I bought lots of pencils to give to my grandchild one day.
JOFFE: You bought pencils?
JAAKSOO: Yeah. Pencils, because pencils represent language and the arts.
JOFFE: After today, stores won't accept kroons anymore. They all have to be turned into the central bank, where Viljar Raask and his colleagues are collecting them in a big pile. And over the next couple of months...
VILJAR RAASK: We destroy it.
JOFFE: You'll destroy it.
RAASK: We will burn them in order to generate heat.
JOFFE: To heat houses or something?
RAASK: Yes. Something like that. Yes.
JOFFE: Chana Joffe-Walt, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As NPR's Anthony Kuhn reports from Brisbane, floods in northeast Australia have hurt production, and that has caused global commodity prices to spike.
ANTHONY KUHN: Professor John Rolfe specializes in Australia's resources economy at the University of Central Queensland. He argues that it's not just the total cost of the disaster that matters but its impact on the larger national economy.
P: Hurricane Katrina had a very big impact, but I think what is true here is that this shock would be a larger shock to the Australian economy proportionally than Katrina was to the American economy.
KUHN: The reason is that the state of Queensland has a dominant proportion of some of Australia's most valuable commodities. Many of these are sold to China, whose voracious demand for resources has driven commodity prices up, says Rolfe.
P: Commodity prices are very important to Australia. We are in the fortunate position of having a lot of coal to sell and a lot of iron ore to sell, again, because of the China growth, and that's really driving the national economy.
KUHN: Brian Redican, a senior economist at the Macquarie Group in Sydney, says this will take time.
NORRIS: That could take up to three months or maybe even longer before those coalmines are ready to go back into production. And, you know, Queensland controls about maybe half of the ocean-going traded coking coal market. So that's a lot of supply that's been removed from the global market at the moment.
KUHN: Redican notes that other coking coal producers, including Indonesia and the U.S., are profiting from the short supplies.
NORRIS: All those other suppliers that have been playing second fiddle to Queensland in recent years will now really be able to take advantage of those high prices and provide a much more important source of supply for the global market.
KUHN: But Tracey Allen, a commodities analyst at Rabobank in Sydney, notes that Queensland does not dominate Australia's production of those crops.
NORRIS: The reductions to cotton production Australia-wide are really at about an 8 percent sort of level. So it is a very significant downgrade up in Queensland, but when you consider production on a national level, we are still predicting a record crop issue with record production at about 3.95 million bales, I should say.
KUHN: Anthony Kuhn, NPR News, Brisbane.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
It is the end of an era in Tunisia. After more than 23 years in power, President Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali left the country today. His departure follows more than a month of increasingly violent demonstrations against his rule.
NORRIS: Eleanor Beardsley is in the Tunisian capital and she sends this report.
MOHAMED GHANNOUCHI: (Speaking foreign language)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: Just before 7 p.m., Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi came on Tunisian state television to announce that he would be taking over from President Ben Ali because he was no longer able to exercise his duties. The prime minister made no mention of Ben Ali's whereabouts, but Arab and European news reports say he has fled the country.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
BEARDSLEY: All throughout the day Friday the crowds grew larger and larger on Habib Bourguiba Avenue in the heart of Tunis. People from all walks of life gathered to express themselves like never before, they said. The crowd was peaceful, but bold and upbeat, at times singing the Tunisian national anthem. Everyone said the changes Ben Ali had promised in his televised speech last night were too little too late.
BEN KALEMI: (Speaking foreign language)
BEARDSLEY: We're here to say it's time for him to leave, says Ben Kalemi. The country is bankrupt and he has failed on every front. He is no longer credible.
KALEMI: (Speaking foreign language)
BEARDSLEY: Salima Karim(ph) runs a bookstore.
SALIMA KARIM: To import books from any country, we have to have a visa from the authorities. No books can be sold in our country if you don't have that visa. To have one book, we have to many times to wait months. And so many books are forbidden.
BEARDSLEY: Western powers like France and the U.S. have supported Ben Ali because he has been a bulwark against Islamist extremism. But people in this mostly secular country say there is no danger of extremism here. They say it's time for the world to support their pleas for real democracy.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
BEARDSLEY: Suddenly, shortly before sundown, the situation turned violent. The panicked crowd fled as the police fired tear gas. Journalists were forced into their hotels as the street battles continued.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
BEARDSLEY: I'm looking out my hotel window, which is in downtown Tunis on the main boulevard. Just half an hour ago it was filled with thousands of protestors calling for change. Now there's trash everywhere, tanks and riot police who are continuing to skirmish in the streets with youths throwing bottles and rocks and the police are responding with tear gas.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
BEARDSLEY: The one thing protestors said they could never forgive their president, says Habib Hamami(ph), was the killing of innocent people who were simply demanding their rights.
HABIB HAMAMI: Unidentified Woman: (Speaking in foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
BEARDSLEY: For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Tunis.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
U: Gary Blumenthal is president of World Perspectives, a Washington, D.C.-based agricultural consulting firm and he joins us now. Welcome.
GARY BLUMENTHAL: Thank you. Good to be here.
: And, first, why are food prices so high?
BLUMENTHAL: Well, fundamentally we don't have enough supply for the demand that's out there. We had weather last year that wasn't as good as it could've been and so our supply is a bit tighter than usual. At the same time, we've got very good growing demand due to economic growth, particularly in Asia. And so basically imperfect weather has collided with perfect food demand.
: Imperfect weather in Russia, in Ukraine.
BLUMENTHAL: Russia, Ukraine. There's even an argument, you know, our own crops here in the U.S. came in a little bit lower than expected because of imperfect conditions.
: But as you follow events in Australia, say, or Brazil for that matter, where there's a great deal of flooding, we can only imagine it's getting worse.
BLUMENTHAL: Well, weather's never perfect everywhere. And so this has certainly been a factor in many years. You know, 2008, we had a similar situation. We've visited here before.
: 2008 is not a comforting thought, though. During that year, when food prices hit their previous peak, there were food riots in Bangladesh, in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon. Dozens of countries were said to face food crises that year. Where are people this year most vulnerable to food price increases and where might those increases jeopardize even political stability?
BLUMENTHAL: If we look at Tunisia as an example, it's not unusual. You mentioned the political circumstances there. If we look at the Food and Agriculture Organization, which lists generally about 50 countries that are food insecure, one of the common factors across most of them is corruption, poor governance, followed by civil strife. And then in the lower category would be adverse weather conditions.
: You're describing countries that are spending a big share of their income on food. What do we spend on food in this country?
BLUMENTHAL: Nine percent or less. It depends on how you want to calculate it.
: I noticed that the FAO's food price index stood at 90 in the year 2000, the turn of the century. It's at 215 as of December of last month and that just describes a huge increase in food prices.
BLUMENTHAL: Well, some might say that when it's at 90, it describes a very extraordinarily too low a price for agricultural commodities. And one positive out of this is that it's bringing a lot of capital into the industry. I can tell you from having lived through the early 2000s, that we couldn't attract people, we couldn't attract capital. And therefore, there was no preparation for an expanding world population with a capacity to buy more food.
: So you're saying the potential good side of this is there's money to be made in raising food that should in theory attract investment in people and increase production over time.
BLUMENTHAL: It is attracting capital right now.
: Gary Blumenthal, thanks for talking with us.
BLUMENTHAL: My pleasure.
: Mr. Blumenthal is president of World Perspectives, which is an agricultural consulting firm in Washington, D.C.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
First, President Obama went to Arizona and delivered a eulogy.
BARACK OBAMA: And I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
SIEGEL: On Capitol Hill, speaker of the House, John Boehner, cleared the new majority's agenda for the entire week.
JOHN BOEHNER: The needs of this institution have always risen above partisanship. And what this institution needs right now is strength, wholly and uplifting strength.
SIEGEL: And from Alaska, Sarah Palin, lit into those who linked her group's campaign literature to acts of violence.
SARAH PALIN: Journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.
SIEGEL: Well, joining us now, columnists E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and the Brookings Institution and David Brooks of The New York Times. Good to see you both.
DIONNE: Good to see you.
DAVID BROOKS: And you.
SIEGEL: E.J., you first.
DIONNE: I'd like to believe it would be a change in tone. I particularly liked in President Obama's speech his asking us to expand our moral imaginations to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy. So I pledge myself to listening to David more carefully and empathizing with him more. But I thought that was actually a lovely way to put it.
OBAMA: civility is not a sign of weakness. But if you actually look at the whole statement, he said, so let us begin a new remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness and sincerity is always subject to proof. And so what Kennedy was saying and I guess my attitude here is: hope, but verify.
SIEGEL: David Brooks, what do you think?
BROOKS: And then the final thing and I think this is the most important thing, it's acknowledging your own weakness. I need E.J. because I don't have 100 percent of the truth. I may have 60 percent, he may have 40, but, you know...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: No. We each have a share of the truth.
DIONNE: Now we know what this civility is all about.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: But we need each other to balance each other out and we need the conversation. Without that conversation, we really have nothing. And so that's why we need civility because individually each of us are weak.
DIONNE: I just want to say, David and I both love Reinhold Niebuhr. He had an excellent Niebuhr line in his column today. One of my favorite Niebuhr lines on this theme is: We must see the error in our own truth and the truth in our opponent's error. That's a wonderful idea. It's awfully hard to run a campaign on the basis of that principle.
SIEGEL: Speaking of that, it appears at this moment, that President Obama is more popular than he was a week ago, and that Sarah Palin, less so. Do you think there will be lasting consequences for those two political figures, David?
BROOKS: She does not have a political strategy. She has a media strategy. And the way conservatives develop their media strategy is to offend liberals. And what she does is she continually picks phrases and things that will offend a lot of people in the country. And this is the way she rallies conservatives to her side. And it works as a media strategy. As a political strategy, I think even a lot of conservatives say we may sort of like her, but she's not ready to be president and I'm afraid she showed that again this week.
DIONNE: The fact she pulled them down from her website suggests that she understood this at some level. She should've just said it. And I think she would've been so much better off.
SIEGEL: I just want to get beyond Tucson for a moment here. David Brooks, the House Republicans now in the majority have their retreat this weekend. What are the questions they have to answer at their retreat?
BROOKS: I think over the last three, four weeks he's made it abundantly clear he's a moderate, pragmatic liberal. They have to take a new look at him and decide where they can work with him. And I think they're actually more willing to do that than one might suppose.
SIEGEL: Do some Republicans say there's no such thing as a moderate pragmatic liberal?
BROOKS: No.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You've created an odd creature there?
BROOKS: No, I think I've heard from a number of them. They said, you know, he's not as liberal as he was before. I'm becoming more optimistic there will be less gridlock over the next year than I would've thought maybe a month or two ago.
SIEGEL: E.J., thoughts on that?
DIONNE: I'm a little less optimistic than David is. Partly because I wish the Republicans could've kicked down the road having this debate on health care, which is still, by the way, called the repealing the job killing health care law act. I don't think they needed to debate that now. It would've been nice to kick it down the road a little bit.
SIEGEL: E.J. Dionne, David Brooks, thanks to both of you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
BROOKS: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And as NPR's Jackie Northam reports, Zardari isn't getting much relief while he's here.
JACKIE NORTHAM: Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, says the attack sent a clear signal to the Obama administration that despite efforts to curb militancy, there's a serious undercurrent of extremism that has grown and metastasized in Pakistan.
BRIAN KATULIS: The concern of infiltration of those extremist voices in Pakistani's security services, a country that has anywhere from 70 to a hundred nuclear weapons, is the thing that keeps many people in Washington up at night.
NORTHAM: Security and counterterrorism efforts are among the issues discussed today by Presidents Zardari and Obama before the Holbrooke service. But Katulis says Zardari isn't the best man for that discussion because he doesn't hold much sway.
KATULIS: The meeting between President Obama and Zardari is an example of head-of-state diplomacy at its most complicated. Zardari, as the head of civilian government, really doesn't have as much power over those security issues as do Ashfaq Kayani, the head of the Pakistani military, or Ahmad Shuja Pasha who's the head of the Inter-Services Intelligence.
NORTHAM: Jamie Metzl, the executive vice president of the Asia Society, says Pakistan needs to do better to justify U.S. support.
JAMIE METZL: We've spent $20 billion in Pakistan since 9/11, huge amounts of military aid; lately, more civilian-focused aid, and the situation in Pakistan seems to have gone from bad to worse.
NORTHAM: Kamran Bokhari, with the intelligence firm STRATFOR, says there are two schools of thought in Washington over how to deal with Pakistan. One is that Pakistan is playing a double game with Washington.
KAMRAN BOKHARI: This view says we need to be able to sustain the pressure on Pakistan, they can definitely do more, they're just not doing it. On the other hand, there are those who say Pakistan is already quite weakened. So if we demand more from the Pakistanis, what that means is that there is a good chance that it could further undermine stability within Pakistan.
NORTHAM: Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Robert.
SIEGEL: And there've been lots of rumors and reports of a potential Carmelo Anthony trade from Denver to the New Jersey Nets. And this is not a simple one- man-for-one-man trade they're talking about.
FATSIS: No, as reported it would involve three teams: The Nuggets, the Nets and the Detroit Pistons, and as many as 17 players plus various draft choices. This would be the biggest trade in the history of the NBA. The biggest trade before this involved five teams and 13 players. And if it happens, and it is not all clear that it will, the biggest logistical hurdle might be making sure that the teams having enough players while the new guys get their physicals and travel from their old club to their new club.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FATSIS: But the Nets and their new owner, the flashy Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, they're desperate to make this trade. They want to use Carmelo Anthony as the centerpiece for a planned move to a new arena in Brooklyn in 2012.
SIEGEL: Yeah, but explain this: Denver is a good team this year. They have a record that, as of now, would get them into the playoffs. Why would you trade away your best player, Carmelo Anthony?
FATSIS: But it's more complicated in basketball. For the Nets to make this deal, they've got to make sure that Anthony is willing sign a contract extension, so that he doesn't just become a free agent anyway at the end of the year. And that does not appear to have happened yet.
NBA: Trades in the NBA are often more about accounting than they are competition, and because of the scope of this proposed deal, this one's kind of an accounting nightmare.
SIEGEL: OK. Let's turn ever so briefly to the actual game of basketball. Last night Carmelo Anthony helped the Nuggets do something that few teams have done lately, which was beat the Miami Heat.
FATSIS: Everyone who has been rooting against LeBron suddenly has been disappointed.
SIEGEL: But then he gave them more to root against in a post-game interview.
FATSIS: Yeah. He said that the team - that they're calling themselves the Heatles now, the Heatles. Not the Beatles, the Heatles. And he took a lot of grief for being self-aggrandizing, and he didn't who was John and who was Paul... (Soundbite of laughter) FATSIS: ...but LeBron did have a smile on his face. He did have a smile on his face when he said it, and I thought it was a funny bit of playground wordplay.
FATSIS: And the reference here is to Cavaliers' owner Dan Gilbert, who, after LeBron decided to leave Cleveland as a free agent, wrote that he was taking bad karma with him. And in this instance, LeBron came off as petty and insensitive, especially to his ex-teammates who have lost 21 of their last 22 games.
SIEGEL: Have a good weekend, Stefan.
FATSIS: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: Stefan Fatsis, who talks with us on Fridays about sports and the business of sports.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Rich Rodriguez, recently fired as the University of Michigan football coach, decided to clear out his closet of everything related to the Wolverines and donate it all to the Wayne, Michigan, Salvation Army.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Four hundred thirty two items, most of which will be auctioned tomorrow, including Michigan jackets, shirts, hand towels, and this big ticket item says Major John Aaron of the Salvation Army.
JOHN AARON: (Salvation Army) A hat with the sweatband well used, with his autograph of the visor.
NORRIS: Hmm, is Aaron afraid Ohio State fans might come and buy something just to burn it afterwards?
AARON: Yeah. We have got the people around the corner, and if we see the plates coming in from Ohio, well, you know, I really can't tell you too much more about that right now. But we've got the police on high alert, and we're going to be keeping an eye out for those guys.
SIEGEL: The Rich Rodriguez auction will run from noon to 2:00 p.m. tomorrow.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And it's time now for your letters. And first, we received many critical notes about a commentary on Wednesday's program. Writer Daisy Hernandez described her thinking when she heard about the shootings in Tucson.
DAISY HERNANDEZ: What I wanted to know was the killer's surname. My eyes scanned the mobile papers. I held my breath. Finally I saw it: Jared Loughner. Not a Ramirez, Gonzalez, or Garcia. It's safe to say there was a collective sigh of brown relief when the Tucson killer turned out to be a gringo.
NORRIS: Hernandez claimed that if the shooter had been Latino it would have fueled aggressive anti-immigrant talk and policies.
SIEGEL: Well Doug Robalin(ph) of Glenn Allen, Virginia, wrote this: While I can understand commentator Daisy Hernandez's relief that the Tucson shooter was not Hispanic, any sympathy I might have for her position evaporated when she referred to Jared Loughner as a gringo.
NORRIS: That word, gringo, led dozens of you to write to us. Jennifer Dahl(ph) of Sister Bay, Wisconsin, sent this: I can't believe you let her run with calling someone a gringo multiple times. It's a slur, bottom line, and don't we get enough of that elsewhere in the media?
SIEGEL: A few of you did write in to defend Daisy Hernandez. Here's what Kent Yoder(ph) of Glendale, Arizona, had to say.
NORRIS: As a middle-aged white male from Arizona, I have only this to say in response to Ms. Hernandez's commentary: Amen, sister. Amen.
SIEGEL: And our inbox was filled with many grateful letters about eight-year old Elizabeth Hughes. She sang the national anthem at a hockey rink in Norfolk, Virginia, last week. She was out on the ice singing, proudly, when suddenly her mic cut out.
ELIZABETH HUGHES: I was upset because I didn't get to sing my high note, and barely anybody probably could hear me. And I was just really disappointed.
NORRIS: She didn't get to sing that high note, but she did get to sing along - along with the crowd. That's because everyone the stadium joined in. When I spoke with Elizabeth yesterday, she finally got to sing that famous high note.
HUGHES: (Singing) O'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.
SIEGEL: Well, hearing that, Steve Drake(ph) of Midland, Michigan, wrote this: I think all the pent-up feelings from this week's events in Arizona, and all the political baggage that this tragedy revealed, were released in her little voice singing the song that makes us all Americans.
NORRIS: Robert, I guess that's a freeway moment.
SIEGEL: Thanks for honking and for writing. You can reach us at NPR.org. Just click on Contact Us at the bottom of the page.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
For nearly half a century, Stewart nurtured playwrights and performers who would go on to change the face of theater in New York City and beyond. NPR's Joel Rose has this appreciation.
JOEL ROSE: Ellen Stewart had a hand in everything at La MaMa.
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL RINGING)
ELLEN STEWART: Good evening ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to La MaMa.
ROSE: Stewart welcomed audiences, she designed costumes, and commissioned new plays. In the early years, she even swept the steps outside the East Village basement that served at La MaMa's performance space. This was a long way from the mainstream theater scene in the early 1960s as she told NPR 20 years ago.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)
STEWART: Particularly since the dressing room was the bathroom, and we had to tell everybody, if you want to go to the bathroom, you can't. You have to go out and go down the street to the bar, because the actors are in there.
ROSE: In the succession of basements and warehouses, La MaMa helped launched the careers of playwrights Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson; directors Robert Wilson and Tom O'Horgan, and too many well-known actors to name.
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "TORCH SONG TRILOGY")
HARVEY FIERSTEIN: (as Arnold Beckoff) That's right, Ma, you had it easy. You lost your husband in a nice, clean hospital. You know where I lost mine? I lost mine on the street, that's right. They killed him on the street. Twenty-seven years old laying dead on the street, killed by a bunch of kids with baseball bats. That's right, Ma, killed by children. Children taught by people like you, because everybody knows that queers don't matter.
ROSE: Before "Torch Song Trilogy" became a film or a Broadway hit, Harvey Fierstein's play had their first performances at La MaMa. Fierstein says Stewart had an unconventional way of deciding what to produce.
FIERSTEIN: She had an instinct. She didn't read scripts. She was the first to tell you, I don't read scripts. She didn't watch very many of the shows. She watched some of them, but not - she wasn't all that interested. What interested her was being MaMa and inspiring people to do work.
ROSE: Stewart was an inspiring presence: an African-American woman with a flamboyant wardrobe and accent to match. She grew up in Louisiana. She moved to New York in 1950 and found work as a fashion designer. Stewart started La MaMa as a place where aspiring playwrights could see their work produced.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)
STEWART: My only notion was that they were supposed to write some plays. I was going to make the costumes. I would support this little basement that I had rented by doing freelance work.
ROSE: Stewart transformed an abandoned frankfurter factory on east Fourth Street into the center of off off-Broadway. La MaMa archivist Ozzie Rodriguez remembers the first time he saw the company's current home in the late 1960s.
OZZIE RODRIGUEZ: When I first saw this building it had been abandoned for 17 years. She showed me the building, I thought this is a disaster. She said, oh no, you're not looking at it the right way. Look at the possibilities, not the faults, the possibilities.
ROSE: Most of those shows never made it to Broadway, but actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein says that wasn't the point.
FIERSTEIN: Though each one of these plays may not be so famous our known by a wide audience, somebody saw that play and that encouraged them to go on and do something else if you know what I mean. It's the art that comes out of a community.
ROSE: That community honored Stewart two years ago at a ceremony renaming one of La MaMa's theaters in her honor.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
ROSE: In spite of her age and declining health, Stewart kept working to produce more than 50 shows a year at La MaMa.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)
STEWART: I just hope to God we can survive, that's all. There are other places that are much younger than we who do get funds as an institution, so all we can do is just hope to survive.
ROSE: Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
But first, here in a Washington-area hotel ballroom, the Republican National Committee chose a new chairman. He is Reince Priebus, the head of the Wisconsin Republican Party. And after his election, he spoke - and he quoted Ronald Reagan.
NORRIS: Our nation is that shining city upon a hill, and we must work to keep it that way. We recognize that the Democrats have taken this country on the wrong path. We must lead the way to a better committee and a better America. And you've seen my plan to move this committee forward, and it starts right now, on day one.
SIEGEL: NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea was at the RNC meeting and he joins us now. Don, tell us about Reince Priebus.
DON GONYEA: Of course, it was a big Republican year, but nowhere was it better than it was in Wisconsin. And people are hoping he can bring some of that to the national stage as 2012 looms already.
SIEGEL: This is a man from Kenosha, Wisconsin. Does he think he's ready for prime time?
GONYEA: First, he says, the party has great leaders - and great, visible leaders. And he points to, you know, John Boehner and Eric Cantor. But he also says hey, Wisconsin has been a swing state, a battleground state, one of those fiercely contested states for so long. And he looked around the pack of reporters - you know, most of us from Washington - standing there, asking him questions after his victory. And he said, I've seen most of you in my office in Wisconsin. So it's not like I'm not used to people coming and asking me questions, and meeting the media.
SIEGEL: Now, the election of Priebus' RNC chair ends the Michael Steele era. He'd hoped it would continue; he sought re-election. Just briefly, how do we describe Michael Steele's tenure as Republican National chairman?
GONYEA: And Michael Steele had trouble raising money. The RNC is $20 million in debt, which they have to pay off - not to mention other controversies and stories that have dogged him from the beginning. So they wished him well today but they did, essentially, fire him.
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Don.
GONYEA: Thank you.
SIEGEL: NPR's Don Gonyea.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Audie Cornish joins us now from Baltimore. Audie, describe the scene and the mood there.
AUDIE CORNISH: The emphasis here is on strategy, especially the strategy of moving forward with some of the more contentious issues in light of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the sort of national call to somehow affect the debate in Congress.
NORRIS: And to that debate, as they move forward, the Republicans plan to vote on repealing the health care law next week. Has there been any change in tone that you can detect or at least when they talk about that?
CORNISH: But with the shooting of Representative Giffords, some people do think that there will be some shift in the way the debate is conducted. So here's Kevin McCarthy. He's a Republican from California, and he's the Republican whip. Let's hear what he had to say.
KEVIN MCCARTHY: Any time America sees the unbelievable event that took place, what happens is that you look back and see what you value. We value life, and we saw a friend get terribly injured in this process. And people are going to look to one another a little differently. So it doesn't matter what you debate on the floor. I think the floor will change.
CORNISH: Another test of that may be the State of the Union. We've got some Senate Democrats floating the idea of everyone having bipartisan seating usually at the State of the Union. It's Republicans on one side, Dems on the other. And McCarthy and a couple of other House Republicans have said, you know, there's no assigned seats, there's no reason why we shouldn't seat together. Let's give it a try at the end of this month.
NORRIS: Audie, what other issues are going to be prioritized as the Republicans move forward with their agenda next week?
CORNISH: The top issue is the raising of debt ceiling and also the continuing resolution to fund the government. That ends in March. And so, all of the effort to rein in spending and all of the effort to make budget cuts is going to sort of - that rubber will hit the road in the next few weeks when lawmakers have to decide are they going to raise the debt limit so that the country can borrow more and not default on any its debt.
NORRIS: Beyond the Republican members of Congress, there are some other guests there - Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. They're potential presidential candidates in 2012. And there are some governors there as well. What's been their role at the retreat? Just quickly.
CORNISH: Their role is to bring things back to the state and to help unify the overall message. So instead of the House Republicans sort of being out on their own, maybe like they were in '94 with Newt Gingrich and all that sort of thing, you're trying to get everyone on the same page so that their marching forward more or less with a similar message going into 2012 and that campaign.
NORRIS: Thank you, Audie.
CORNISH: Thank you.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Audie Cornish covering the House Republican retreat in Baltimore.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Emily Corio of West Virginia Public Broadcasting reports.
EMILY CORIO: The EPA revoked a permit that would have allowed Arch Coal Company to bury tons of rubble in streams. West Virginia's Environmental Protection secretary, Randy Huffman, says the Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit in 2007 and he disagrees with EPA's veto.
RANDY HUFFMAN: The issue about the veto is the fact that the federal government has gone back on its word and changed its mind after four years, and that's just unacceptable.
CORIO: The Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition is one of several groups trying to stop the mine since it was first proposed in the 1990s. Project coordinator, Vivian Stockman, is pleased with the EPA's veto, and not surprised by the reactions of politicians and the coal industry.
VIVIAN STOCKMAN: They're really failing to look at the big picture here, which is there can be no economic development is areas where there is no clean water.
CORIO: For NPR News, I'm Emily Corio in Morgantown, West Virginia.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Welcome to the program.
SANDY HUISMAN: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: What will these changes mean for you?
HUISMAN: Well, we've been implementing healthy changes for several years now, so it's not as drastic as it might sound. Probably, the biggest changes for us are the requirements to offer additional servings of fruits and vegetables. And then, as you mentioned, the change to restrict the offering of starchy vegetables and focusing more on the dark green, orange vegetables.
NORRIS: You know, I can hear the cries from the backseat from kids listening to this. No more French fries, what is that going to mean?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HUISMAN: We will still be able to offer sweet potato fries, but mashed potatoes, corn are some of our more popular vegetables, and we will need to limit those.
NORRIS: Since you're going to be serving more fruit and more leafy green vegetables, also more orange vegetables...
HUISMAN: Mm-hmm.
NORRIS: ...as you mentioned, sweet potatoes, carrots, squash and things like that, does that mean that there will be more fresh fruit and veggies on the menu?
HUISMAN: We will certainly be offering the canned and frozen options. From a cost standpoint as well as a storage standpoint, we will need to rely on those.
NORRIS: That's a big change. How do you meet that new standard?
HUISMAN: It is a very big change. And one of the good things about the legislation is that they're requesting that that happens over 10 years from the point of implementation, which allows several things to happen. Hopefully, manufacturers will get on the bandwagon and start changing the way they're producing items. And hopefully, that will happen not only for items that are produced for school lunch programs, but manufacturers will see the benefit of doing that for all foods that they're offering.
NORRIS: How do you suspect kids will respond? What do you think will be the biggest jolt to their systems - less pizza, whole wheat pizza, no more chocolate milk?
HUISMAN: So it's adjusting to - adjusting their taste buds to the healthier offerings.
NORRIS: Any surprises - things that the kids took to immediately that you thought might not go over so well?
HUISMAN: The chicken nuggets with the reduced fat and the whole grain. And I still go into school buildings and what the kids tell me: Oh, your chicken nuggets are just so good. I love your chicken nuggets.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HUISMAN: So they really did not complain about that change.
NORRIS: Sandy Huisman, thanks so much for talking to us.
HUISMAN: Thank you.
NORRIS: Sandy Huisman is director of food nutrition for the Des Moines Public Schools in Iowa. She was talking about the USDA's proposals for healthier menus at schools.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Welcome to the program.
NORRIS: Thanks so much for having me, Michele.
NORRIS: Can you, in a few words, tell us what you were hoping to communicate with this book? What's the core message?
NORRIS: So the book is absolutely not a how-to book. I do not think the Chinese way is superior. It's a memoir. It's really a sort of - a story of my own journey and transformation as a mother, and it does explore these issues. You know, what's the right balance?
NORRIS: It's a journey that you're on. And you really do need to read the entire book, and not just the excerpt, because you do land in a very different place at the end of the book. But in the beginning of the book, you spell out some of the things that a Chinese mother believes. And if you don't mind, I'm just going to tick through a few of them because I do have...
NORRIS: OK.
NORRIS: Were these...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NORRIS: So Michele...
NORRIS: ...the touch points for your life when you were growing up?
NORRIS: You know, I hope people see, Michele, that that is a little tongue in cheek. I mean, come on. I - the one thing I can say is, I know that my kids grew up knowing that they were deeply, deeply loved. And it was hard, it was hard, you know? And I'm actually really proud of the relationship that we have.
NORRIS: I so appreciated your honesty in this book because parenting is something that, you know, despite all the manuals and all the discussions about it in public forums, is something that happens behind closed doors. And you are incredibly candid. You really lay bare, you know, what these experiences were like for you. And you write about how you handled your daughter Lulu when she was 3. What happened on that day?
NORRIS: She looked at me - and she's 3 years old - and she steps outside into the cold. And I start to panic, you know? The whole book is full of Lulu calling my bluff. I didn't think she would go out there. So I quickly said, OK, you're quiet now, come back in here. And she just shook her head, and she wouldn't come in. I had to bribe her back in with hot chocolate and brownies but I - that's how I set up the book.
NORRIS: Jed, did you know what you were getting into when you struck this arrangement?
NORRIS: You know, to me - maybe I'm wrong - but I always thought the way we were raising our kids was more of a traditional American way - you know, the values of hard work and perseverance, and being taught that you can overcome obstacles, and respect.
A: It's not the parenting style in which I was raised. My family really did have the more permissive emphasis on individuality, creativity, freedom. And those are great values. And we tried to give our kids those values, too. But it's really true that my parents - and a lot of parents, I think, in that generation - didn't, you know, put expectations on kids. And I'm one of those people who sort of wishes that their parents had made them learn an instrument, or something like that.
NORRIS: Did you ever clash over this at all? Were there ever any concerns? And Jed, when I ask you this question, I'm thinking about a moment in the book where you noticed these marks on the piano, and you realize that your very driven daughter was actually gnawing on the piano when her parents weren't looking.
NORRIS: But those marks, whatever they indicated, and I - assuming they indicated frustration and, you know, something was hard to do. And things are hard to do for children, and kids will typically give up if the parents don't push them. What kid wants to practice a musical instrument so much that they really get good at it, you know? If the parent doesn't make them, it's probably not going to happen.
NORRIS: Amy writes that the measure of Chinese parenting is how the children, in the end, wind up viewing their own mother and father. And you use your own father as a cautionary tale in that sense. He was very resentful of his own parents and in fact, he was estranged from them because of their outsized expectations. This is a tough question to ask, but I'm wondering what your daughters think of you.
NORRIS: I mean, I guess I'm proud of the parent that I've been. I know I'm being judged very harshly by people out there. You know, that does hurt. But in the end, it's just how my daughters feel and think about me that matters. They are outgoing, strong-willed girls with lots of friends. And you know, I think my odds are good, but I don't know. It's a work in progress. I can only hope, you know? We can only try to do our best.
NORRIS: Amy and Jed, thank you so much for being with us. This has been wonderful.
NORRIS: Thanks so much for having us.
NORRIS: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: That's Amy Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld. Amy's new book is "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother."
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Richard Gonzales has that story.
RICHARD GONZALES: Pam Simon walked into a sea of happy faces and open arms.
PAM SIMON: Hi, everybody.
CROWD: Hi, Pam.
GONZALES: She suffered gunshot wounds to her wrist and chest. Her message was simple.
SIMON: I happened to get hit by a bullet, but all of you, especially those of you that were there, you got wounded too.
GONZALES: Simon's arrival is the most visible sign that perhaps the staff of Gabrielle Giffords' can begin their own healing. Since Monday, they've hosted a stream of constituents, friends and volunteers offering condolences and long hugs. And then there's food, lots of food.
KARAMARGIN: Well, this is a fraction of the type of stuff that has been happening here. People have been coming by from all over the place.
GONZALES: C.J. Karamargin is Giffords' communications director. He says the staff was still reeling from the initial shock of the shooting when they decided that opening the office on Monday morning as usual would send an important message.
KARAMARGIN: And no act of depravity would be enough to close down this small little outpost of our government. The office is open, our government is open, our democracy is open and that hasn't changed.
GONZALES: Sara Hummel Rajca handles immigration and veterans affairs for Giffords. She's also the staff photographer, so she was at the congresswoman's side when the gunman started shooting. Rajca managed to find cover.
SARA HUMMEL RAJCA: Not that I'm trying to repress anything, but working through this, I mean, keeping the office open is what Gabrielle Giffords and what Gabe Zimmerman both would have done.
GONZALES: Rajca says the news that Congresswoman Giffords is recovering helps keep the staff strong. But she says the death of 30-year-old fellow staffer, Gabriel Zimmerman, still seems unreal.
HUMMEL RAJCA: Tomorrow, I want to walk in, you know, go sit down at my desk, say hi to Gabe as he drinks his Dr. Pepper as he comes in and, you know, chat about the weekend and, you know, have things be like they were last Friday. But it's not that way and time doesn't stop and we'll just keep going forward.
GONZALES: C.J. Karamargin's eyes well up as he talks about his friend.
KARAMARGIN: When I turned on the TV and heard that, I broke down. He said, Gabe Zimmerman died in the line of duty. Soldiers die in the line of duty. Firemen die in the line of duty, police officers. First responders die in the line of duty. When do social workers die in the line of duty? It's just, it's just tragic.
GONZALES: As for his own mourning, Karamargin says he hasn't really had time for it yet.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR DRIVING)
GONZALES: Back outside the office, there's a memorial of countless candles and flowers and dozens and dozens of placards with poems and prayers. Carmen Mayer, a semi-retired accountant, reads one that brings a smile to her worried face.
CARMEN MAYER: And I like that - and love will hold us together, make us a shelter to weather the storm. That's what's going to happen. It's going to take a while. A long time.
GONZALES: Richard Gonzales, NPR News, Tucson.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And, Martin, let's start with a revised timeline which was released today by the sheriff's office.
MARTIN KASTE: What they're doing is they're filling in more of the white space, the gaps in the time leading up to the attack, especially the night before the shooting. That's where we're getting the most new information.
F: And as we've reported earlier, we know more about the morning here. That morning then, he was stopped running a red light. He got off with a warning. He then had a run-in with his father early in the morning, took off running. His father chased him but didn't catch him. And then a little later, he called the taxicab, which allegedly took him to the scene of the crime.
NORRIS: Martin, reaching back to that night before the shootings, do we know anything more about those photos?
KASTE: Well, the photos, that's the newest piece that's come in here this afternoon that's quite fascinating. The photos are apparently in the possession of the FBI. They're not releasing them - at least for now - but sources are telling NPR that the photos are lewd, that they show Loughner in a red G-string and holding a Glock pistol near his crotch and by his buttocks. So far, we have not seen those photos.
NORRIS: Does this new information change the overall narrative of this story?
KASTE: Well, what it adds is this frenetic activity the night before the attack. Just the fact that he was staying in a motel and not at home, that raises some questions by itself about what kind of warning, if any, his parents might have had that he was acting strangely.
NORRIS: Martin, before we let you go, can you please give us a quick update on Congresswoman Giffords and her condition?
KASTE: And one of the staffers I talked to today - one of her congressional staffers who was also wounded, Pam Simon - told me that she visited Giffords in the hospital and held her hand. And when Giffords' husband told her who it was, who was there visiting her, she squeezed her hand quite significantly - very obviously in a form of greeting to her. So that was greeted as great news by the staffers in her district office.
NORRIS: Martin, thank you very much.
KASTE: You're welcome.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Martin Kaste in Tucson.
GUY RAZ, Host:
Jay Bakker has one of the most famous last names in evangelical Christianity, or perhaps infamous, being the son of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker.
RAZ: The PTL Television Network presents Jim and Tammy.
RAZ: But he never lost his connection to faith, and he's written about it in a new book called "Falling to Grace." Back in 1994, Jay Bakker cofounded Revolution Church, a place that was designed to be everything his parents' empire was not. For one thing, the church meets in a Brooklyn bar. And, well, then there's the preacher, Jay Bakker.
M: Well, I'm about 5'8", covered in tattoos. I have full tat sleeves and my fingers tattooed. I wear a leather jacket and jeans usually and a T-shirt.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
M: So, Marlon Brando's probably one of my fashion icons with my hair, which is awesome.
RAZ: I think you look a lot - I mean, strikingly similar to your father, Jim Bakker, if Jim Bakker was in a hardcore punk band.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: That's what you look like.
M: He was for a while.
RAZ: He was before he went into the ministry.
M: Yeah, I do. I look a lot like my father.
RAZ: The tattoos isn't just about, sort of describing your appearance, but it's actually a pretty fundamental part of who you are because of what those tattoos say. And I want to ask you about some of them. You have one on your body that says, religion destroys.
M: Yes.
RAZ: Can you explain that?
M: Well, I got it probably 10 years ago. And it's just the idea that manmade religion and tradition really hurt people. And we use it as a game. And my idea back then, especially, was more of promoting a relationship with Jesus and following the life of Christ and not being religious about it. Religion can be a very dangerous thing, and I think it's a constant reminder to me to be careful.
RAZ: The word grace shows up in this book a lot, and it's a word you use a lot. When you use that word, what do you mean?
M: And to me, that's grace. And grace gives us the ability to love others and love our enemies, which is sometimes a very tall order.
RAZ: You are a pastor. You have a ministry. It meets in a bar in Williamsburg, which is like sort of the mecca, I guess, for hipster America. You know, where you got a lot of kids in skinny jeans riding fixed-gear bikes.
M: A lot of adults.
RAZ: You end your sermons asking your members to tip the bartender on their way out. Describe what a typical service is like because you're in a bar.
M: Yeah. Well, service is usually, we - people get there early. Some people get drinks, some people don't. I speak usually for 45 minutes to an hour sometimes. Then, we dismiss and then we hang out some more.
RAZ: You have been very vocal about your support for things like gay marriage, that you believe abortion should be legal. I mean, couldn't somebody argue that you have actually just taken sort of liberal or left-wing ideas and applied them to your faith?
M: And I think it's the opposite of what I understand from the teachings of Christ, and even the teachings of Paul, even though a lot of people will blame Paul for what some people call the clobber scriptures against the LGBTQ community. And I believe that the church is unfortunately still the taillight, as Martin Luther King used to say. And I'm hoping that we can become the headlight one day.
RAZ: I know that you were very close with your mother and with her up to the moment when she passed away. Talk a little bit about your relationship with your dad. What is it like?
M: So it's gotten to the point where we're not trying to change each other. I think we're just trying to understand each other.
RAZ: You've been accused of sort of engaging in what some people call cafeteria Christianity, pick and choose what you want. On your Facebook page - and I don't - I haven't seen it recently, but it did say that the - under religion, it did say changing.
M: Yeah.
RAZ: And you have questioned or wondered whether things like hell exist, whether the Bible really does condemn homosexuality, whether Sodomites were nothing more than simply people from the town of Sodom.
M: Right.
RAZ: Can you sort of explain how you sort of get to that point with some of those issues?
M: The Bible isn't a book that you can just pick up and just read as a sixth grade level. I mean, it's a good book, and I want people to read it. But as soon as you start to look deeper into the book itself and to the context and to when it was written, things start to change, and you start to see things in a different way and realize that maybe we've been taking a really elementary understanding of Christianity.
RAZ: Do you pray every day?
M: No. I try to pray every day but there's sometimes where my doubt gets the best of me.
RAZ: Hmm. I'm sure a lot of people would be surprised to hear that. But you are an abiding Christian. I mean, you are a faithful Christian.
M: Yeah, most of the time. You know, I mean, like I said, doubt is a big part of my faith. And without doubt, I feel like there's no growth. So, you know, it's a constant struggle. And - but to me, it's a beautiful struggle.
RAZ: Jay, thank you so much.
M: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
RAZ: The answer to the question is quite often China. And in a recent poll taken by CNN, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they regard China's wealth and economic power as a threat. And that anxiety seemed to fuel some of the news coverage this week when video surfaced of a test flight of a prototype Chinese stealth fighter.
RAZ: China's military showing off its new stealth fighter jet.
RAZ: Known as the J-20, a rare glimpse of the future of China's air force.
RAZ: And it happened while Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is in China.
RAZ: China, in a show of military bravado, has staged its first test flight of a stealth fighter jet.
RAZ: And so perhaps in a bid to relieve some of the anxiety about China's rise and its intentions, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the issue yesterday.
S: This is a critical juncture, yes, but I would say to my fellow Americans, this is not a time to fear for the future.
RAZ: Now, as I mentioned earlier, there are conflicting viewpoints about America's position in the world and China's rise. In a moment, we'll hear from someone who says stop panicking.
B: This Time It's For Real."
M: I think in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it's become clear that we're going back to a world in which, although America will remain a preeminent power probably for a while yet, it has competitors again.
RAZ: And you predict that as a result of this, that the relationship between China and the U.S. will actually get worse in the next year.
M: But I think also the Chinese are beginning to feel that, well, you know, our time is coming and that it may be a bit time for us to be a little more assertive. The China-U.S. relationship has always had elements of friendship and cooperation and rivalry. And I think the rivalrous elements are becoming more emphasized now.
RAZ: But it still is a - very much a mutually dependent relationship. China depends on the U.S. market for its products. The U.S. depends on China, of course, for borrowing. The conventional wisdom on that relationship is that if it is managed properly, both sides win. So why is that wrong?
M: I think the political aspect is that a rising power like China, particularly a China that has a very different political system from that of the United States and that has a sense that it has been humiliated in the past, inevitably they are going to be more assertive in ways that we find uncomfortable.
RAZ: So specifically, what would a more assertive Chinese power do?
M: I think the way they see it is they gradually grow Chinese power and military capabilities at a time when America is increasingly under financial strain and is cutting back on its military or is thinking of cutting back on its military and that that balance of forces changes over 10, 20 years and more, which means that they don't have to have a direct confrontation because people just gradually get used to the new situation. Now, it may not be that smooth or that easy.
RAZ: As you know, there have long been comparisons between where America is now and where Great Britain was at the end of the 19th century, and I wonder if those comparisons are somewhat hyperbolic.
M: However, I think where the parallel is interesting is that, I mean, it does suggest that all dominant powers have their period. And then whether through its replacement by another power or by a multipolar system, whether through war or by peaceful means, generally, no power is dominant forever.
RAZ: Gideon Rachman, thank you so much.
M: Thank you.
RAZ: Thomas P.M. Barnett is the chief analyst at Wikistrat and a former Pentagon analyst. He's just back from China. And it's fair to say, he's got a different perspective.
M: I always say if you want to understand an America like a China, invite everybody, and I mean everybody in the Western Hemisphere to come live in the continental United States. Would we have rich people? Lots of them. Would we have a big middle class? Big middle class. Would we have six, 700 million interior rural poor? Yes. And that would feel like China.
RAZ: So you, I mean, so you would concede that China won't sort of overtake the United States economically, maybe militarily anytime soon, but that it could conceivably happen in the next 40 or 50 or 60 years.
M: And I think if we accept the fact that they just, you know, they're not going to turn into America on our timetable and stop being so stung that 40 years after Nixon goes to China, they're still Chinese, I think we can live with them the next 20 years. And actually getting through the next 20 years with them cooperatively, collaboratively is not only a good idea, it's absolutely essential when you consider a global middle class aspiring to a lifestyle that the planet cannot sustain if we use old resource models.
RAZ: It seems pretty clear that China won't necessarily fill that role as a sole superpower but rather become another pole of power along with the U.S. I mean, hasn't that already started to happen in a sense?
M: First half of the 20th century, that octet and a few others killed a hundred million people. We've created the system for these people to rise, and now we seem uncomfortable with the fact that we're not going to be the sole pole anymore in the system. And we don't seem to know how to ask anybody else's help.
RAZ: Thomas Barnett, thank you so much.
M: Thanks for having me on.
GUY RAZ, Host:
In Haiti, much of the capital, Port-au-Prince, still lies in ruin a year after last year's devastating earthquake. Just days after the disaster, we heard the story of how a violin sonata in A major composed by Cesar Franck in the 19th century helped to keep one of the victims alive.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Romel Joseph managed to live, but his left hand was crushed. When we spoke to him last year from his hospital bed, he made this promise.
ROMEL JOSEPH: The only thing I do know is as soon I'm able to walk and I'm functional that I will go back to Haiti, and I will start the reconstruction of the Victorian School.
RAZ: Romel Joseph, welcome back.
JOSEPH: Well, it's a pleasure to be with you guys again. And I would like to wish everyone a happy New Year 2011.
RAZ: Indeed. How are you doing?
JOSEPH: Well, my feet are not quite okay yet. My hand, I still have the iron plate in two fingers but it's a lot of improvement for sure from last year.
RAZ: You left Haiti after the quake, of course, to be treated. You have been back since. What is it like now?
JOSEPH: Oh, the first time was really amazing. It's like, wow, that's really what happened. And we have clean up done in Victorian School's space, and we are in the process of rebuilding a temporary shelter. The students have started school. I mean, Haiti has a long, long way to go. But however, we have hope that it's going to get there. I mean, we have to hope.
RAZ: One of the most amazing things about you in talking with you last year was your resilience, your ability to maintain your optimism and your hope. But I wonder over the past year, I mean, were there times where, say, you had trouble sleeping or you were just really deeply, deeply upset?
JOSEPH: But, again, eventually, it's like, well, you know, life has to go on. So that - this is a whole new episode of my life and I have to follow the mission that I have for the rest of the time I have around.
RAZ: Your left hand, which was crushed when you were trapped under the rubble, I understand it has recovered enough to actually play the violin, somewhat. Is that true?
JOSEPH: Yes. My left hand has recovered enough so that I can play Mozart; I can play something that are not too difficult. But I'm really thankful because it's - I'm going to play some things. And it's really wonderful because I never thought I would be able to play again.
RAZ: Romel, I don't want to put any additional strain on your hand, but I was wondering if maybe you could play something for us just ever so briefly. And I understand your daughter is there with you and that you have been playing with her a little bit now and again.
JOSEPH: Yes. She is with me. She plays the viola and I play the violin, and the two of us together will be playing the "Passacaglia" by Handel. And we're playing some parts of it, because it's a beautiful piece; kind of sad and at the same time it has happy ending, which is what it's going to be all about, a happy ending, a happy recommencement.
RAZ: Romel Joseph, thank you so much.
JOSEPH: Thank you very much.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PASSACAGLIA")
RAZ: That's Romel Joseph. He's the founder of the New Victorian Music School in Port-au-Prince. It was destroyed in the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He's written a new book about his life experiences titled "The Miracle of Music."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PASSACAGLIA")
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GUY RAZ, Host:
The Red Hot Chili Peppers are one of the biggest bands in the world. Two of the founders, Anthony Kiedis and Michael Balzary, better known as Flea, met at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. And with their friend Hillel Slovak, they created what's become their signature mix of L.A. funk, punk and psychedelic rock.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: Many critics have called Flea among the greatest living bass players in the world. But few of his fans know that his background is actually in jazz.
FLEA: I started playing trumpet when I was a kid in junior high school.
RAZ: And you were raised in a jazz household, I think.
FLEA: And, you know, it really felt good to me to get away from what my parents wanted and what they were teaching me in school. And then it turned out that Hillel told me that they weren't happy with their bass player and how do I feel about learning to play the bass. And next thing you know, like, two weeks later, I was on stage at Dizzary's(ph), a nightclub in Hollywood, rocking.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: When you look through this book and you flip through it, it almost feels like you're looking through a private scrapbook at times. And then you realize that actually flipping through the pages, you guys are naked on a lot of these pages. It becomes clear that throughout, sort of the history of the band, you guys really must have loved or liked being naked. What is it about nudity?
FLEA: For us, it was just a silly joke. You know, we do it around the house. Like Hillel and Anthony and I all lived together and we'd do it just to be funny, you know? And then it was like, well, this is a bold look, you know?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: Well, I mean, there's a story that you guys even ran naked through the offices of EMI during like a high-level meeting at one point.
FLEA: And we said oh, okay. And we were just walking through the company. I think Anthony and I had smoked a joint or something. And he was like, you know, we should take off our clothes and run in that meeting and jump up on the table and dance around. That'll freak him out. And, you know, the last thing it was, was calculated, you know? And so, I was like, great idea, and we did it. And, you know, they were really pissed off and we danced around. The expressions on their faces was something that I hold dear to my heart. And then we put on our clothes and ran out of there.
RAZ: You guys had "Higher Ground" under EMI, which was your first sort of (unintelligible).
FLEA: Oh, yeah. Yup.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HIGHER GROUND")
RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS: (Singing) People, keep on driving...
RAZ: And my personal favorite, "Magic Johnson," as an L.A. Laker fan. I always penetrating a lane like a bullet train or wanting to.
FLEA: I hate to burst your bubble but triple double trouble, is coming to your town and it's going to make rubble.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAGIC JOHNSON")
HOT CHILI PEPPERS: (Singing) Penetrating the lane like a bullet train, comes the magic blood a telepathic brain. Knucklehead suckers better duck when the buck comes through like a truck. Scott stops, pops and drops it in, on his way back gets a little skin, from the hand of a man named A.C. Green, slam so hard it break your TV screen. Worthy's hot with his tomahawk, take it to the hole make your mamma talk. I hate to burst your bubble but triple double trouble, is coming to your town and he's going to make rubble.
RAZ: Flea, this book is, I mean, I think it's fair to say it's almost a love letter to Hillel Slovak. And of course, he died of a heroin overdose in 1988. And a lot of what you write in the book, especially in the beginning, is about him and his influence on you and his impact on you.
FLEA: But more than that, you know, he was a brother, a beloved friend and just a beautiful person and a great artist. You know, I have paintings hanging in my house that he made that are just beautiful paintings that he did when he was a teenager, you know, these beautiful, deep oil paintings. And, you know, any gratitude that we can show to him would - doesn't come close to measuring, you know, the love and gratitude that we have for him.
RAZ: Flea, I know it's an unfair question...
FLEA: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...and I hate to ask this question of artists, but it's always something that people are interested in knowing. What are your favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers records?
FLEA: You know, it's hard as the years go by because you hear them so much, you know? And I really - like the time when I really like them is when we make them, you know? I felt like "Californication" really captured us as a band.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALIFORNICATION")
HOT CHILI PEPPERS: (Singing) Psychic skies from China try to steal your mind elation. And little girls from Sweden dream of silver screen quotations. And if you want these kind of dreams, it's Californication.
FLEA: It was a real all-for-one-one-for-all feeling when we made it.
RAZ: It was a sort of a millennial album, just at the turn of the millennium.
FLEA: It was. Yeah. Yeah. That one, I feel like - and the last one, "Stadium Arcadium," I felt like, you know, as a band we've continued to grow as time has gone by. And, you know, I feel like all our records are different, but I felt like "Stadium Arcadium" was a record that really encompassed everything that we had done from our beginning until that time.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SNOW (HEY OH)")
HOT CHILI PEPPERS: (Singing) Come to decide that the things that I tried were in my life just to get high on. When I sit alone, come get a little known but I need more than myself this time. Step from the road to the sea to the sky, and I do believe it, we rely on. When I lay it on, come get to play it on, all my life to sacrifice. Hey oh, listen what I say, oh.
RAZ: And you guys are in the studio now again.
FLEA: And I started playing the piano. And for this record, for the first time, wrote - you know, almost all of my writing contributions come from the piano, which is a new thing for me and a new feeling and sound for the band.
RAZ: Well, you're going to have to come to Washington, D.C. and play at the Kennedy Center, a piano solo night.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FLEA: Well, I do have a fantasy of a Flea plays Bach record. So I'm working on it.
RAZ: Well, we will definitely talk to you when you put that out.
FLEA: Yeah.
RAZ: Flea, thank you so much.
FLEA: Okay, man. Thanks for having me on.
RAZ: Before you go - Flea?
FLEA: Yeah, yeah.
RAZ: Before you go, I know that you're in L.A. and I'm in Washington. Is there any chance that you'd play a little Bach for us?
FLEA: Oh, a little Bach for you?
RAZ: Yeah.
FLEA: Yeah.
RAZ: I know you have a piano there where you are.
FLEA: Okay. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's just a funky old piano in a lounge here.
RAZ: Yeah.
FLEA: I'll play you a little Bach.
RAZ: Great.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: And for Saturday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. You can hear the best of this program on our new podcast, Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Subscribe or listen at npr.org/weekendatc. We're back on the radio tomorrow. Until then, thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, Host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
BARACK OBAMA: As business resumes, I look forward to working together in that same spirit of common cause with members of Congress from both parties, because before we are Democrats or Republicans, we are Americans.
RAZ: Jim, it's great to have you here.
JAMES FALLOWS: Hello, Guy. Nice to talk to you.
RAZ: Now, Jim, we just heard from President Obama a moment ago picking up on his theme of civility. I know you and many of us watched that speech in Tucson this past week, a speech that may just be remembered as his most memorable.
FALLOWS: I think so. And I am biased as a one-time speechwriter myself that I've been thinking a lot about speeches this week. We are nearing the 50th anniversary of two very important speeches in American history: President Eisenhower's farewell address about the Military Industrial Complex and then John Kennedy's inaugural address right after that.
RAZ: And, Jim, we'll be talking more about Eisenhower's speech on the program tomorrow.
FALLOWS: And I think the ones we heard this week, President Obama's Tucson speech, the ideas in it were not so novel, we should be nicer to each other. It was the tone that made a difference.
RAZ: Jim, I was struck by how many of President Obama's usual detractors praised the speech, and many of Sarah Palin's staunch supporters seemed a bit uncomfortable with hers.
FALLOWS: In contrast, we had Sarah Palin who had a much more defensive tone about who should be blamed and then who should not be blamed for these terrible events. And I thought that speaking entirely analytically, not supporting one side or the other here, I had the sense that I was watching a moment very much like the moment in which Edmund Muskie was crying on the New Hampshire campaign trail in 1972 or when Howard Dean had his scream moment...
RAZ: Scream moment.
FALLOWS: And in all of those cases, fairly or unfairly, that moment sort of crystallized a change in that candidate's prospects. And my guess is, we won't know this for a while, but I think people will look back on that speech by Sarah Palin and its juxtaposition in contrast in tone with a speech later that evening by President Obama and saying - because that was the time when her prospects changed. Whether or not she ever had a serious chance of winning the presidency, I think we have seen something like a Howard Dean moment in that speech.
RAZ: Jim, thank you.
FALLOWS: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, Host:
Eleanor Beardsley has a story from the Tunisian capital of Tunis.
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: Some were afraid to talk about it, but not 22-year-old Hishem Benyaghem.
HISHEM BENYAGHEM: (French spoken)
BEARDSLEY: I'm very optimistic, he said. This is going to be great for Tunisia. Just fantastic.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTERS)
BEARDSLEY: Claire Spencer, an expert on the Middle East, says that one incident galvanized the population's growing anger.
CLAIRE SPENCER: When the corruption is too flagrant and the responses are too heavy handed, people suddenly say, this is beyond what I and my personal dignity can withstand.
BEARDSLEY: Moncef Marzouki is the head of a banned opposition party. He's been living in France for the last decade, but he's coming home to run for office.
MONCEF MARZOUKI: (Through translator) I am so proud the Tunisian people were able to defeat a dictator. We cannot let anyone steal this revolution from the Tunisian people.
BEARDSLEY: For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Tunis.
GUY RAZ, Host:
NPR's Eric Westervelt reports from Budapest.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
M: (Foreign language spoken)
ERIC WESTERVELT, Host:
Hungarian Public Radio journalist Attila Mong is a co-host of his country's version of MORNING EDITION. His show "180 Minutes" is the most listened to news program in the country. Late last month, Mong protested the new media laws with one minute of dead air.
M: My main concern is that it can reinforce self-censorship mechanisms in a country which came out of dictatorship only 20 years ago.
WESTERVELT: For his protest, Mong was immediately suspended and pulled off the air. Some Hungarians now call him a press freedom hero. He finds it amusing and ironic that after 20 years of democracy, being silent for one minute passes for heroism. Mong says he was just trying to get people to reflect.
M: That something serious is going on with one of their fundamental rights, the freedom of speech and freedom of the press. This one minute of silence was maybe an elegant way of saying that everybody should stop for a minute and think it over once again what's happening.
WESTERVELT: He says Prime Minister Viktor Orban has crafted an almost cult-like following among his ruling Fidesz party. And with his party's two-thirds majority in parliament, Horvath says, Orban is consolidating power across all institutions. He's done away with a fiscal council, which oversaw budgets, moved to replace the head of the Hungarian central bank, imposed retroactive so-called crisis taxes, and restricted the powers of the Supreme Court.
M: They have a constitutional majority in the parliament. So if it occurs to Mr. Orban that he would like to sleep with different virgins every night, he can legally introduce the right to first night, as in the medieval ages. There is no one, no one, contradicting him on any issues in his own party. The only limitation is imagination and any moral convictions he might or might not have.
WESTERVELT: Still Kovacs worries Orban's moves will do long-term political damage to the country.
M: Hungary could become a black sheep in the community. That it's a country, which violated the principle of democracy, the basic principles of European integration. Then Hungary will lose sympathy, credibility, and Hungary will lose support. And we will pay a very, very high price.
WESTERVELT: At a recent welcome event in Budapest for visiting EU officials, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso voiced confidence in Orban and Hungary's democracy.
M: This is a democratic country and I think it's important to have no doubts about it. And so, it's important also that the prime minister, this government, take all necessary steps for this to be clear in Hungary and outside Hungary.
WESTERVELT: Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Budapest.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLOCK TICKING)
GUY RAZ, Host:
And that's the sound that lets you know our Three-Minute Fiction contest is now open. And if you haven't heard, here's the challenge this round.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: One of the characters must cry.
RAZ: And one more thing...
NGOZI ADICHIE: One of the characters must tell a joke.
RAZ: That's our judge, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She'll be picking the winner, which could be you, but there's just one week left to enter this round. To see the full rules and submit your story, go to our website, npr.org/threeminutefiction. And that's Three Minute Fiction, all spelled out, no spaces.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLOCK TICKING)
GUY RAZ, Host:
Two hundred years ago this month, the wealthy socialites of New Orleans were just kicking off the Carnival season. The high-society plantation owners and their wives were hopping from one masquerade ball to the next, and all-night drinking parties were filled with the city's elite ruling classes. But what they didn't know is while they were partying, their slaves were plotting.
DANIEL RASMUSSEN: Every man assembled knew that his presence meant a near-certain death sentence if the revolt failed. No slave revolt in Louisiana had ever before been successful, and the punishment for failed rebellion was clear: Torture, decapitation and one's head upon a pike.
RAZ: And Daniel Rasmussen joins me here in the studio. Welcome to the program.
RASMUSSEN: It's great to be here.
RAZ: Let's start out by talking about Charles Deslonde. He's really the heart of this story. This is a man who was a slave, the son of a white plantation owner and a black slave. He, by all accounts, was a very loyal slave, right?
RASMUSSEN: What does that mean? A driver is like an overseer. They carry the whips. They punish the undisciplined slaves. They chase the ones that escape. They hold the keys to all the locked doors. He was Andre's right-hand man. And in the eyes of many slaves...
RAZ: This is Manuel Andre?
RASMUSSEN: Yeah.
RAZ: Who was a brutal plantation owner, as you go on to describe.
RASMUSSEN: Absolutely. And in the eyes of the slaves, I think Charles must have seemed like the ultimate betrayer, the man who is working with the master, you know, who is working to oppress them.
RAZ: How did Charles Deslonde go from being this seemingly loyal slave driver who was presumably despised by slaves to becoming the mastermind of this insurrection?
RASMUSSEN: So Charles would move up and down the coast. And as he was doing this, rather than deliberating about the best time to plant sugar or harvest the crop, Charles was sowing the seeds of an insurrection. He was, in modern terms, the ultimate sleeper cell.
RAZ: Tell me what happened that night, January 8, 1811.
RASMUSSEN: Second reason, William Claiborne, the governor of the territory, sends out the dragoons, which are the most impressive military force the Americans have, to Baton Rouge to fight the Spanish. And no coincidence that the slaves wait until America is embroiled in the war with the Spanish. The bulk of the American military force is gone. A mere 68 regular troops are left in New Orleans.
RAZ: Wow.
RASMUSSEN: And finally, on January 4th, a rainstorm blows in. Why is this important? Well, it means that you can't transport artillery, and so slaves, armed with cane knives, axes, muskets, have a much better chance against another set of military forces only armed with muskets, as well, than they do against a force that has artillery.
RAZ: Right.
RASMUSSEN: This is a sophisticated, politically motivated armed force, consciously invoking military imagery, political imagery, to say: We're no longer slaves. We're men, and now we are free.
RAZ: Daniel, what was the overall plan? I mean, they were headed towards New Orleans. What were they going to do?
RASMUSSEN: You know, it's hard to say what exactly they intended. But if we look at other revolts, contemporaneous revolts, revolts that happened in 1812 in Cuba, for example, or, you know, what happened in Haiti, I think we can get a much more clear picture of what the slaves would have intended.
RAZ: What they intended to do, yeah.
RASMUSSEN: And that is the establishment of a black republic, an independent black republic on the shores of the Mississippi River.
RAZ: The result is bloody and brutal. What happens to the slaves who were killed and even those who survived?
RASMUSSEN: And then, obsessively, collectively, they chop off the heads of the defeated slave rebels and put them on poles.
RAZ: Daniel Rasmussen, why don't we know about this story? We know about Nat Turner. We know about John Brown. It's not too far from where we're sitting here in Washington, D.C., over down in Harper's Ferry. This was the largest slave revolt that we now know of in American history, but we haven't known much about it since now.
RASMUSSEN: They cannot acknowledge that the slaves were anything more than criminals. If they acknowledge that the slaves are not property, are not chattel but are people with real political ideals...
RAZ: That begins to undermine everything they stand for.
RASMUSSEN: It undermines the entire ideology that underlaid slavery.
RAZ: That was your intention. I mean, I've read that you actually wanted people to know about this story of heroism, another side of slave history.
RASMUSSEN: What I'm trying to do is not only bring their story, tell you about Charles Deslonde, about Kook, about Quamana, but to think about these enslaved men and women as people who contributed to American history, who fought and died for their beliefs and who were brave and heroic.
RAZ: Daniel, thank you so much for coming in.
RASMUSSEN: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, Host:
We spoke about it on the program yesterday and we pick up that theme today. But with a look back, 50 years ago, to a speech that reverberates, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address.
P: We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.
RAZ: But first, a little background. Eisenhower's speech came after two decades of rapid military industrialization in America, a process that began when nearly three million Americans were encouraged to invest billions in war bonds.
(SOUNDBITE OF ADVERTISEMENT)
RAZ: You are speaking because your name is on a piece of paper, a war bond. And the enemy listens to you and dies when America speaks.
RAZ: That money, along with the high taxes of the Roosevelt era, fueled a vast military machine.
P: We must increase production facilities for everything needed for the Army and Navy for national defense.
RAZ: But then in 1957, the process was ratcheted up another notch when Russia launched its Sputnik satellite.
RAZ: You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the Earth circling satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age.
M: Sputnik ended a - an era of normalcy in the 1954 through '57, and Eisenhower was trying to apply the brakes to it.
RAZ: That's Dwight Eisenhower's grandson, David Eisenhower. He says it was against this backdrop of an increasingly hostile Cold War when his grandfather issued a warning that night, January 17, 1961.
P: We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations. Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American - we recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications.
RAZ: David Eisenhower, we now know that he spent weeks, perhaps months, on this speech, going through a variety of drafts. He knew that this speech was going to have an impact.
M: Interestingly, it was delivered within 65 hours of another speech on that list, John Kennedy's inaugural on January 20, 1961.
P: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
M: One interesting angle on the Eisenhower farewell is to compare and contrast it with the message that John Kennedy delivers on the 20th.
RAZ: Because you would argue that they're not entirely - they don't have entirely different messages.
M: Eisenhower's farewell address, in the final analysis, is about internal threats posed by vested interests to the democratic process. But above all, it is addressed to citizens and about citizenship.
P: Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.
RAZ: David Eisenhower, in your book about your grandfather, Dwight Eisenhower, you write that he developed a split personality...
M: Yeah.
RAZ: ...about this speech, that he would sort of downplay its significance to his old military pals and to business friends, but then he would sort of show a pride in it to others. How do you square that?
M: Well, there's a lot of buzz, and people acted as though, again, this was something out of the blue. It was certainly not. (Unintelligible).
RAZ: And maybe they thought he just sort of, I don't know, had...
M: Did he speak the truth? That's the beauty of Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address. I have immersed myself professionally for many years in the Eisenhower papers. I know how his mind worked. I know what his habits of expression were. This is Dwight Eisenhower in the farewell address, and he speaks the truth.
RAZ: David Eisenhower, thank you.
M: Thank you.
RAZ: Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel and a professor of history at Boston University, says Eisenhower's warning came too late.
P: I think we should view the speech as an admission of failure on the president's part...
RAZ: Hmm.
P: ...an acknowledgment that he was unable to curb tendencies that he had recognized, from the very outset of his presidency, were problematic.
RAZ: His antidote to the growing military-industrial complex, this term that he coined that night, was a better informed citizenry. But he was vague about that. I mean, he didn't specifically say this is how you combat it. Do you think that was a shortcoming of the speech?
P: I don't. I think in many respects, that's the piece that we've overlooked, and we've missed.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
P: He believed that if there was an antidote, the antidote would have to come from citizens being knowledgeable and engaged and watchful.
RAZ: Even though you would acknowledge that didn't happen. I mean, in some ways, what Eisenhower warned about has finally caught up with us.
P: Well, I think so. I mean, one of the reasons that people didn't pay much attention to the farewell address at the time was in the 1950s, a guns-and-butter recipe seemingly had worked. We were safe and we were prosperous, so what was not to like?
RAZ: You could build the highways and you could also build the bombers(ph).
P: Exactly right. In our present circumstance, we can no longer insist upon having both guns and butter. And we are compromising the possibility of sustaining genuine prosperity at home.
RAZ: You write that there were hints of what was to come in this speech almost eight years before, in a speech he gave to a group of newspaper editors just after Joseph Stalin died. What did he say there that foreshadowed his farewell address?
P: This is the speech that historians call his cross of iron speech. This former five-star general stated categorically that spending on military power, the purchase of weapons, constituted what he described as theft, theft from people.
P: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, of its children, a theft. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
P: And I think that Americans have been interested, really, in hearing that message at a particular time. But Americans today, I think were they to return to that speech, would find that it resonates in the circumstances in which we find ourselves today.
P: This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
RAZ: Andrew Bacevich, last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed about $100 billion in cuts to the defense budget over the next five years. Is he starting to chip away at some of the military-industrial complex?
P: I think not. It's not so much cuts to reduce the overall level of defense spending. It's cuts exacted here in order to transfer that money to another defense account.
RAZ: So how do you, I mean, how would you even begin to try and carry out what Eisenhower warned against? I mean, I wonder if it can be done.
P: If you can challenge that assumption, then I think it becomes possible to ask a whole - an additional series of questions that can lead to an argument about a different and more modest national security posture that will be more affordable and still keep the country safe.
RAZ: Andrew Bacevich, thank you so much for coming in.
P: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
Throughout the last decade, The Decemberists, a band out of Portland, crafted elaborate, hyperliterate song cycles, songs steeped in British folk tales and Dickensian character studies. They hit their majestic pinnacle two years ago with "The Hazards of Love," a 17-part rock opera.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC
THE DECEMBERISTS (Music Group): (Singing) (Unintelligible)
RAZ: And fans wondered: How could they follow that? Well, they broke it all down and started over again.
SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC
RAZ: Simple, straightforward, acoustic instruments recorded in a barn. This is the latest album from The Decemberists, and the title might be a clue about their formerly legal sound. It's called "The King Is Dead."
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T CARRY IT ALL"
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) Here we come to a turning of the season. Witness to the arc towards the sun.
RAZ: Colin Meloy is the frontman for The Decemberists, and he joins me from KOPB in Portland, Oregon.
Colin, welcome to the program.
Mr. COLIN MELOY (Musician): Thanks for having me.
RAZ: So this song that we're hearing, it's called "Don't Carry it All." It has a very Americana sound. And even though The Decemberists is an American band, of course, for so long you guys have been associated with a British folk tradition. What brought about the change on this record?
Mr. MELOY: I feel like I've spent the last four years sort of steeped in the British folk revival of the '60s and '70s, music which was relatively new to me.
RAZ: Like Fairport Convention and stuff like that.
Mr. MELOY: But I was sort of poring over it and almost like you would come to a music you've discovered as an adult as opposed to being a kid. So I kind of had this sort of academic approach to it, and how it was sort of reflected in the music we were making felt very cerebral and academic.
And I think I reached the sort of the apotheosis of the possibilities of what I was doing. And it was really a time to kind of pull it back a little bit and sort of rediscover the music that I sort of have in my bones from being a kid and music that got me playing music to begin with.
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DON'T CARRY IT ALL"
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) And nobody, nobody knows. Let the yoke fall from our shoulders. Don't carry it all, don't carry it all.
Mr. MELOY: I just - it was just sort of what I was feeling. And I feel like on every record, I've inevitably kind of followed my creative whim, I think for better or worse, and this time around, that whim was to make something simpler, just to write pretty songs. That was really the core intention behind a lot of the songwriting was just to write sweet, pretty songs.
RAZ: Let's hear another track from the new album. This one's called "Calamity Song."
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALAMITY SONG"
Mr. MELOY: Had a dream, you and me and the war of the end-times.
RAZ: (Singing) Not everyone can carry the weight of the world.
SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER
RAZ: I have read that in this song, you were trying to write an homage to REM, particularly early REM, from the mid-'80s, the "Reckoning" era, which is a brilliant album. And that jangly, slightly Southern sound, I hear it so clearly. It is such sort of a nice homage to that. And what it is about that time and what REM was producing back then that you wanted to capture?
Mr. MELOY: For me, you know, hearing that era, '84 to '86....
RAZ: You were young. I mean, you were a kid.
Mr. MELOY: Yeah. And I lived - I grew up in Helena, Montana, and so it was really hard to get a hold of music. But I had an uncle who was going to school at the University of Oregon, and he would send me mix tapes of all the music that he was discovering.
And he would send them, and, I mean, it was just eye-opening for somebody, you know, who lived in a town where the only record store was the Pegasus Records, and, you know, in the mall. And you - if it wasn't on a major label, you wouldn't be able to find it.
And so that music has always really stuck with me. And I think that REM's music, particularly from that era, has informed everything that I've done. I feel like I've been making fake REM songs from the very outset of my songwriting.
And so I think with this record, it was an attempt to try to rediscover that because I feel like I had moved away from that.
RAZ: One of the, sort of the signatures of REM, have been kind of impenetrable lyrics. Yours have been described as literary. And I'm wondering if you can sort of help me work some of them out.
Hetty Green, queen of supply-side, bonhomie, bone drab. Know what I mean?
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CALAMITY SONG"
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) ...bonhomie, bone drab. Know what I mean? On the road it's well advised that you follow your own bag.
RAZ: In the year of the chewable Ambien tab.
Mr. MELOY: Yeah. Well, it's nonsense, isn't it? You know: Know what I mean? I guess, that's the punchline. In the year of the chewable Ambien tab, I had been reading David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest."
RAZ: Oh, yeah.
Mr. MELOY: And in his future, time has been subsidized by corporations. So you get the Year of Glad or the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarments. So that was my own idea of what a year would be subsidized as.
RAZ: I'm speaking with Colin Meloy of the band The Decemberists. Their new album is called "The King is Dead."
The songs on this record, I read, were recorded in a barn. I hope that it was at least a comfortable barn.
Mr. MELOY: Gosh, I wish it was. It was comfortable in that the owners of the barn were incredibly hospitable. But there was no heat, and there was no plumbing. We'd scheduled it. We were, like, well, if we make a record in a barn, we should do it, you know, when the rainy season ends.
RAZ: And this is in Oregon. You had a view of Mount Hood out of this barn, right?
Mr. MELOY: Yeah. But for whatever reason, winter extended well into June this last year, and it was freezing cold. So we had space heaters going the whole time. And anytime that you needed to go to the bathroom, you had to, you know, put your wellies on and go tromp through the mud to the outhouse. So it was kind of unpleasant.
RAZ: Did anybody in the band say, okay, enough with this principled idea, inspiration and all this nature of recording, but let's get to a studio in the city.
Mr. MELOY: You know, no. Nobody ever really questioned it. I think everybody was game. I think the more that nature threw at us, the more we were determined to soldier on.
(Soundbite of song. "This is Why We Fight")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) And this is why, this is why we fight.
RAZ: You have two tracks, toward the end of the album, about - I'm assuming about war. And I want to ask you about the song "Dear Avery" with Gillian Welch. Can you tell me how this song came about?
Mr. MELOY: It was shortly after my son had been born. You know, while I never thought that that event would really change the way I wrote songs, but it definitely changes the way you view the world. And I think I've been reading a lot about soldiers in one of the wars that we are now embroiled in and imagining what it would be like to be a parent and thinking of your kid sort of in a harm's way that way. And where, you know, I think one of the impulses as a new parent, I mean, what you're constantly doing is sort of pulling your kid out of danger, you know, always on guard, especially when they're toddlers, at a moment's notice to (unintelligible).
RAZ: You just worry about them all the time, don't you?
Mr. MELOY: Yeah. And it's really a physical thing.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. MELOY: You know, if you see they're about to fall, you just pull them away.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. MELOY: And I would think that that impulse would never leave you. And so I think that song is sort of a letter from a mother or father to a son.
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEAR AVERY"
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) There are times life will rattle your bones. And will bend your limbs. You're still far away the boy you've ever been. So you bend back and shake at the frame of the frame you made. But don't you shake alone. Please Avery, come home.
RAZ: That's Colin Meloy. He's the frontman for the band The Decemberists. Their new record is called "The King is Dead."
Colin Meloy, thank you so much.
Mr. MELOY: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me.
RAZ: And if you'd like to hear a few tracks from the record, go to our website, that's nprmusic.org.
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DEAR AVERY"
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. Remember, you can hear the best of this program on our new podcast, Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Subscribe or listen at npr.org/weekendatc. We're back on the radio next weekend. Until then, thanks for listening, and have a great week.
GUY RAZ, Host:
If you're looking for final proof that machines are taking over even the most human of tasks, our producer Brent Baughman says he's found it in a new challenge being taken on by artificial intelligence.
BRENT BAUGHMAN: Artificial intelligence already exists in a lot of places. It's what recommends movies for your Netflix queue, and even some cars now have automatic parallel parking. But the basic definition of artificial intelligence is when a machine learns to do something.
DMITRIY GENZEL: Basically something that a machine cannot do well, but a human can.
BAUGHMAN: That's Dmitriy Genzel. He's a researcher at Google. And maybe you've used Google Translate to transform, say, English into Chinese. Well, Dmitriy Genzel is part of a team at Google working with that same technology to tackle what he says is one of the biggest challenges in artificial intelligence: translating poetry. And it's what computer scientists call AI complete.
AI: AI complete.
GENZEL: Which means that it's as hard as any problem that's considered to be an artificial intelligence.
BAUGHMAN: So take Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GENZEL: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary...
BAUGHMAN: Unidentified Woman: (Spanish spoken)
BAUGHMAN: So Dmitriy Genzel says if you want to translate this to English, here's what his program does.
GENZEL: Unidentified Woman: Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away...
GENZEL: Unidentified Woman: Dreary, pondered and weak.
GENZEL: So those also we don't want. So what we do is we search through this huge space of billions and billions and billons of possibilities, and we do it in a smart way so that we pick ones which are both accurate and fluid.
GENZEL: Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and...
BAUGHMAN: But just a quick reality check here. Translating the actual language isn't even the hardest part. Where things get more complicated is with meter. Take Shakespeare.
GENZEL: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
GENZEL: I'd say Shakespeare is usually in iambic pentameter, which means you get five what they call feet, and each foot has two syllables, one unstressed and one stressed.
BAUGHMAN: One Dmitriy's program can do is look through a pronunciation dictionary, sort of like you would use to learn a foreign language.
GENZEL: Unidentified Woman: Compare thee, compare thee.
GENZEL: So you know exactly how many syllables a word has and where the stress is on the word.
GENZEL: Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
BAUGHMAN: But even that, Dmitriy Genzel says, is not the hardest thing for artificial intelligence to do.
GENZEL: The hardest thing to do is rhyme because rhymes are not just in one place in the sentence. It connects to different places.
BAUGHMAN: Unidentified Woman: (Spanish spoken)
BAUGHMAN: Unidentified Woman: Once upon a midnight dreary...
BAUGHMAN: But when they get to the word that has to rhyme...
GENZEL: While I pondered weak and...
GENZEL: We don't make one decision. We make a thousand.
BAUGHMAN: That means for every translation that's close...
GENZEL: While I pondered weak and teary...
BAUGHMAN: ...there's another sentence in this thousand that's not even close to a rhyme.
GENZEL: While I pondered weak and orange...
GENZEL: So it will pick orange just as happily, and it will have to then through it away afterwards.
BAUGHMAN: But, Dmitriy Genzel says, working to improve translation software of any kind is still useful.
GENZEL: Most of the content on the Internet is not in English anymore. Even for English speakers, if you read a news article, you know, about some country, you know, you bet if you open their news site, which may not be in English, and read that, you will get huge understanding that people don't really see things in the same way as, you know, that you might read in the foreign press, for example.
RAZ: That's researcher Dmitriy Genzel, who works for Google. He spoke to our producer Brent Baughman. And in our podcast this week, you can hear our credits translated into amphibrachic trimeter by Google's poetic translation program.
GUY RAZ, Host:
Even the most creative fiction writers would have a hard time coming up with this next story, perhaps because it's all true, a story that appears in the latest issue of Wired magazine.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
RAZ: And it begins at a PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania, on August 28, 2003. A middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walks in. He's wearing a loose white T-shirt that hardly conceals a giant bulge in his neck.
RICH SCHAPIRO: In his right hand, he's holding a bizarre-looking cane. He walks up to the teller. He hands the teller a note declaring a bank robbery.
RAZ: And 15 minutes later, state troopers track Brian Wells down at a parking lot of an eyeglass repair shop, and this is where the story gets weird.
SCHAPIRO: Unidentified Man #1: The following is an Action News 24 special report.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "ACTION NEWS 24")
SEAN LAFFERTY: Good afternoon. I'm Sean Lafferty. We have breaking news at this hour.
SCHAPIRO: This scene played out for roughly 20, 25 minutes, when finally the device around Mr. Wells' neck started to beep. And 10 seconds later, it exploded.
(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)
RAZ: Wells dies within minutes. Inside his car, police find that walking cane. And on second inspection, they realize it's disguising a homemade, high-powered shotgun. And they also find cryptic notes that read like a scavenger hunt.
SCHAPIRO: You know, go to the McDonald's and you'll see a flowerpot. There is a picture of where the pot is in relation to the arch.
RAZ: About an hour before the robbery, Brian Wells was sent to deliver two pizzas to a remote spot on the outskirts of the city by a TV transmission tower. Some reporters from the Erie newspaper went to check it out the next day. Only one person lived in the area, and he was standing on his front porch, curious about all the investigators and reporters milling about. His name was Bill Rothstein.
SCHAPIRO: He wore overalls. And he's a large man, about 6'2", and he started to talk to them and was very frank and was very open and was clearly very intelligent. Those reporters said they were struck by the sight of this man, who looked almost like a lumberjack and spoke like a college professor.
RAZ: Rothstein was as baffled as anyone else. And for police, the trail went cold.
SCHAPIRO: It was less than a month later Bill Rothstein makes a call to the state police, saying he has a dead body in his freezer.
RAZ: So they raced to his home. And though Bill Rothstein was forthcoming, they also found a suicide note.
SCHAPIRO: The first page of which read: This has nothing to do with the Wells case.
RAZ: The dead man in the freezer was James Roden, and Bill Rothstein said he kept the body there for a friend, a woman named Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, who he said killed James Roden. Diehl-Armstrong was arrested and sent to a county jail. And as for Bill Rothstein...
SCHAPIRO: Just a few months after he called police to report this body in his freezer, he dies of lymphoma.
RAZ: For two years, the case of the pizza collar bomber baffled police, until one day, they got a call from Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. She had information about the Brian Wells case.
SCHAPIRO: She thought she would get some kind of immunity deal. She was getting very poor legal advice. And she spoke at length with detectives.
RAZ: She basically sold herself out.
SCHAPIRO: That's correct.
RAZ: Now, Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong was convicted of the crime last fall, and next month, she'll be sentenced. But from her jail cell, she continues to deny any involvement.
MARJORIE DIEHL: I mean, if I was part of the crime, I'd be scared to death to keep my mouth shut and say: Good God, I hope they never take a look in this direction. You know what I mean?
SCHAPIRO: But questions remain. Who made the high-tech collar bomb? Who turned a walking stick into a high-powered shotgun? Who wrote the scavenger hunt? All questions that puzzled a former FBI agent named Jim Fisher, who started his own investigation, and that led him to a different conclusion.
JIM FISHER: The man at the center of this is Bill Rothstein. You simply cannot discuss this case in any form or any aspect without speaking about him. All the arrows point to Bill Rothstein.
SCHAPIRO: Rothstein lived alone. He spoke fluent French and Hebrew and sang in the synagogue choir. People who knew him liked him a lot. They said he was a genius. So why would he do it?
FISHER: The bank robbery and the murder had to do with a pathological desire to mystify the authorities. This was what I would call a vanity crime. This crime was engineered to make Bill Rothstein feel better about himself.
RAZ: Now, we will never know if that is really the truth. Remember, Bill Rothstein died of lymphoma a few months after Brian Wells was killed.
FISHER: Rothstein had the last laugh, in a sense. He died without going to prison. He died without being convicted of anything. And he took with him all of the big questions surrounding this case.
SCHAPIRO: I thought many times while I was writing it that had this appeared in a work of fiction, it would almost be too outlandish, and people would just discard it. It almost wouldn't make sense.
GUY RAZ, Host:
NPR's Jeff Brady talked with two medics who treated Giffords and others at the scene.
AARON ROGERS: This is our patient care area, and...
JEFF BRADY: Paramedic Aaron Rogers is back at work and showing off his ambulance. He had four days off after the shooting, but the gruesome details of January 8 still run through his head.
ROGERS: One thing that stood out for me was smell.
BRADY: What kind of smell?
ROGERS: It was blood. And there was so much blood on-scene and it being warm, from the sun, that that's what I smelled, that iron-y smell.
BRADY: EMT Wes Magnotta is Rogers' partner on the ambulance.
WES MAGNOTTA: The thing that probably got me the most was stepping in the blood because it was pretty thick to the ground too. So, I mean, you step over and, you know, you'd pick your boot up and all you see is your footprint of your boot in blood.
BRADY: Magnotta and Rogers work for Southwest Ambulance. The company checked in with the two men over the following couple of days and offered counseling.
ROGERS: I'm not big on counselors and things of that nature. I'd rather talk to a friend or relative.
BRADY: Rogers and Magnotta say they rely on each other for support, and they do things to take their minds off that day.
MAGNOTTA: I play video games.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BRADY: For at least one of the shooting victims, getting back to work was important for her recovery. Giffords staffer Pam Simon returned to her office Friday and seemed comfortable recalling the events that left her with gunshot wounds to her wrist and chest.
PAM SIMON: The shots rang out almost simultaneously. I saw Gabby be shot. I saw Ron, and I think I was probably the next one shot.
BRADY: Simon and just about anyone else in front of the Safeway store that day will be at risk for posttraumatic stress disorder, but it's difficult to predict who will be affected, according to University of Arizona psychiatry professor Steven Herron.
STEVEN HERRON: The event, actually, is not necessarily the important thing, believe it or not. It's actually somebody's predisposition.
BRADY: Neal Cash heads the Community Partnership of Southern Arizona, a regional mental health agency. He suspects the stigma surrounding mental illness is partly to blame.
NEAL CASH: If somebody stands up in that same meeting and starts ranting and raving, either they'll be thrown out of that meeting or people may actually run away from that person.
BRADY: Jeff Brady, NPR News, Tucson.
(SOUNDBITE OF TIMER)
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
GUY RAZ, Host:
Round six of our Three-Minute Fiction contest is now open here on weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. And this time around, our judge novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says one character has to tell a joke and one has to cry, and it's not an easy challenge, she admits.
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: I actually do not have any decent jokes.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NGOZI ADICHIE: I - I've just never been very good at the - sort of the art of joke-telling. And I also find that I really don't enjoy the sort of obvious, you know, knock-knock-knock jokes. I find them quite annoying.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NGOZI ADICHIE: But I wonder if you have any jokes, Guy.
RAZ: That's a good question. Let me think about this one for a moment. Okay, I got one. A horse walks into a bar and the bartender asks him, why the long face?
NGOZI ADICHIE: Ha, ha, ha.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
RAZ: As you can see, I don't stand a chance this round. But you do. To submit your story, go to our website, npr.org/threeminutefiction, and that's all spelled out, no spaces.
(SOUNDBITE OF TIMER)
(SOUNDBITE OF BELL)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
We've all been there: You're at a restaurant; you've finished your meal and you really want to pay your check and leave, but the waiter is nowhere to be found. Well, a new service allows you to speed things up by text.
From our member station WBUR, Jessica Alpert reports.
JESSICA ALPERT: It's a Thursday night when I walk into Charlie's Kitchen, a dive bar and cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Charlie's is one of the first restaurants in the country to try TextMyFood, a new service that allows you to communicate with your server via text. I slip into a corner booth and see a sticker on the wall: Can't find your server? Just text.
I'm at table three. I want a tossed salad with ranch dressing.
It's a lot of typing. Send.
In less than five minutes, my meal has arrived.
Charlie's server Kristina Henry watches me navigate the system.
Ms. KRISTINA HENRY (Server, Charlie's Kitchen): You know, there's pros and cons to it. You know, it's great for like, a night like Friday night, when we're really busy. It's packed, and you're running around. People text like, can I have my check, please?
ALPERT: While Kristina acknowledges that TextMyFood may make her job easier, she finds the service impersonal.
Ms. HENRY: As a server, I would rather go to the guests and talk to them face to face, and ask them what they would like - instead of getting it through a computer.
ALPERT: When I visit Bob Nilsson, the president of TextMyFood, he makes it clear that the service doesn't actually replace the server.
Mr. BOB NILSSON (President, TextMyFood): It's not eliminating human contact. There's always a server at the other end. You just want to have that contact sooner. You want to - if you can't see them and can't make that contact, rather than waving your arms or getting up, just use the natural communication and let them know what you need.
ALPERT: Nilsson explains that the goal of the service is to increase the amount a guest will spend. For example, guests are more likely to order another round of drinks if they text the request in the moment. If they can't find the server, they often pass.
Back in the dining room, customer Zach Brickett is not impressed.
Mr. ZACH BRICKETT: I guess it seems kind of pointless because I can tell my waitress to her face what I want to drink, so...
ALPERT: But John McSweeney has a different view. While he calls the system interesting...
Mr. JOHN McSWEENEY: I wonder if there's going to be a lot of abuse of this kind of thing. It sort of occurred to me to maybe, just as soon as we ordered our beers, take out my phone and be like: Beers, stat, now.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. JOSHUA DeCOSTA (Server, Charlie's Kitchen): I've gotten: Glasses are sexy. I've gotten: Two of us need something, and three of us needs your number.
ALPERT: That's Charlie's server Joshua DeCosta.
Prank texting is a problem. In response, some heavy drinking establishments turn off the service after a certain hour. But other managers say they appreciate the ability to monitor guests. If too many inappropriate texts come in from one person, it's time to cut them off.
So I'm sitting with my check and credit card, ready to pay. It's been a while so instead of waving, I decide to send a little text.
OK, T3, my credit card is waiting. Send.
A few seconds later, the server comes over, produces a smile, grabs my credit card, and heads back into the kitchen. We've barely exchanged a word, but I find texting extremely alluring. I message, she arrives.
But don't worry. I left her an in-person tip.
(Soundbite of music)
For NPR News, I'm Jessica Alpert.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
We have more recommendations now from our "Three Books" series. Today, Gish Jen offers her prescription for those of us feeling exhausted by the noise and clutter of high-tech life.
GISH JEN: Are you sick of the world of endless information? Are facts and factoids adding up to less and less truth every day? Perhaps it is time for something fabulous, by which I mean not something great to wear to your next party but something fable-like in its imaginative insight into the human condition.
For example, how about "Michael Kohlhaas," by Heinrich von Kleist? This gripping, 19th century novella about a German man whose horses have been unjustly maltreated feels thrillingly modern as an ordinary, stubborn man demands justice from a system stacked against him.
Greatly beloved of Kafka, who viewed this story, he said, with true reverence, "Michael Kohlhaas" speaks not only of the implacability of power, but also of the mania of heroism and, as the aggrieved man raises an army against his oppressors, the morality of insurrection.
Is the protagonist a holy man or a terrorist? To read this book is to think hard about figures from John Brown to Julian Assange.
Equally rewarding is "Waiting for the Barbarians," by J.M. Coetzee. This haunting love story involves the plump magistrate of a town at the edge of an empire braced for invasion.
Standing helplessly by as empire officials torture the so-called barbarians, the magistrate takes in a blinded and crippled barbarian girl - not for sexual gratification, as you might guess, but for something yet deeper as ritualistically and confusedly, he tends to her wounds, washing her and rubbing her with oil.
You could certainly read this as a parable about guilt and complicity in the apartheid South Africa in which Coetzee was writing, and it is. But "Waiting for the Barbarians" is more than that.
Rich with portraits of cruelty, fear, tenderness and turmoil, the novel asks some profoundly troubling questions. What will become of us without barbarians, for example? An excellent question in an anti-immigrant age. And who are the barbarians, exactly?
And finally, for a change of pace, I recommend Mark Twain's effervescent "Diary of Adam and Eve." If ever you have wondered about the human capacity to make things anew, wonder no more. In recasting the story of the Garden of Eden with unfailing wit and delicious bravado, Twain does more than entertain. He testifies to the great human ability to reinvent, reconceive and reanimate even the most graven of narratives.
This new creature with long hair is a good deal in the way, begins this book. Adam and Eve, in this telling, do not exactly seem a match made in heaven. And yet years later, by her graveside, Adam comes movingly to write: Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.
Love and laughter spring eternal, it seems. And if you think that the economy will never pick up and that we are looking at the end of Western civilization as we know it - well, not to forget: We have been through a fall before and what's more, have lived to tell the tale.
BLOCK: Gish Jen's latest novel is called "World And Town." You can read more "Three Books" recommendations at npr.org/books.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
We are reporting this year on social entrepreneurs: business-minded people taking on some of the planets toughest challenges - hunger, refugees, climate change.
Well, today we have a story from Fargo, North Dakota, where NPRs Jennifer Ludden finds social change in the unlikeliest of places.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...
JENNIFER LUDDEN: At Riverview Place retirement community, a few dozen seniors tap toes and nibble cake. This monthly celebration is something of a counter to the regular funerals here.
(Soundbite of music)
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you...
LUDDEN: The average age of residents is 80. Marketing director Bonnie Peters has long considered this an asset worth tapping into.
Ms. BONNIE PETERS (Marketing Director): Lots of knowledge, lots of experience, a wealth of information that they could share. And so I always had this dream of coming up with something that would connect them with a population that they could mentor or serve or help.
LUDDEN: At first, Peters thought that population could be at-risk teens. Then, one day a decade ago, it became clear. Refugees from Bosnia and northern Iraq had begun arriving in Fargo by the hundreds. They needed lots of help. Peters felt she had just the answer.
She got funding for a nonprofit she called Giving + Learning, and started matching up retirees with refugees.
Ms. HELEN GLAWE: Well, it was a new experience. We really didn't know what we were getting into.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. CAROL BROOKS: I had mentored people from Africa, China - Bosnia, too.
LUDDEN: Helen Glawe, age 98, and Carol Brooks, 72, sit in Riverview's library, Glawe leaning on her walker. Like many here, neither has traveled outside the U.S. Glawe's a former teacher. But the two had to improvise when they were challenged with helping an elderly Bosnian couple learn English.
Ms. GLAWE: When we first met them, we were at a coffee shop. I talked about the cup and the saucer, cookies. Well, that was the only thing, you know, that you could make them realize what it was all about.
LUDDEN: Glawe says they had a good time together, and some deep bonds have formed over the years. Carol Brooks wears a thick, gold bracelet of charms engraved with the names and birthdates of those she's helped - Santiago, Andrei, Hussam. She says a lot of them call her Mom.
Ms. BROOKS: In fact, when Mohammed's wife was having a baby, I was in the birthing room at Meritcare. And I told these white nurses, I am Mohammed's mother. And they looked at me kind of funny.
LUDDEN: From tiny beginnings, Giving + Learning has filled a gap in this fast-changing Great Plains town. Though its budget is miniscule and its staff bare-bones, over the past decade, 550 mentors have helped more than 800 refugee families.
Volunteer coordinator Rachel Mertz says she focuses on young mothers stuck at home, and others often left isolated and frustrated.
Ms. RACHEL MERTZ (Volunteer Coordinator, Giving + Learning): Just having that one-on-one interaction with somebody, it's more than just learning English. It's having a friend. It's having that one connection with somebody in the community, and that's invaluable.
LUDDEN: Over the years, refugees have continued to come from Somalia, Sudan, Bhutan and other places. The demand for help soon outstripped the supply of willing residents at the retirement center. So Mertz reached out to civic groups and local universities. Now, students can get credit for being mentors.
Mr. CLIFF TUTTLE: Mahawa? Go on in.
LUDDEN: Volunteer Cliff Tuttle ushers us into the condo of Mahawa Jusu. She fled civil war in Liberia, arriving in Fargo in 2006. What she most wants is to learn to drive.
In her rural village, Jusu says women were not allowed behind the wheel. So for three years, she's waited for buses, enduring Fargo's frigid temperatures, and making a long journey out of what would be a short drive.
Ms. MAHAWA JUSU: If I have to go to my working place, I have to spend one hour, 45 minutes. I have to change three buses.
LUDDEN: When a friend finally took Jusu to the Department of Motor Vehicles, she was utterly unprepared. First, she learned there was a test. Then she was told to take it on computer number seven.
Ms. JUSU: I don't even know how to use the computer. That was my first time.
LUDDEN: After flunking twice, Jusu was put in touch with Cliff Tuttle. He's a retired businessman who's found a calling helping dozens of refugees. He drew a diagram of the DMV computer for Jusu to study, and grilled her relentlessly until she finally got her learner's permit.
Mr. TUTTLE: OK, got your seat belt on?
LUDDEN: Tuttle's now helping Jusu learn to drive. We pull out, and she slowly maneuvers winding residential streets, eyes straight ahead, hands tight on the wheel.
Mr. TUTTLE: Don't cut the corner; don't cut the corner. That's good.
LUDDEN: While volunteers help these refugees, there's a flip side to this program: a healthy dose of self-interest. Fargo is an aging community, and Giving + Learning has helped supply something it desperately needs - certified nursing assistants.
Ms. ZUHRA VUKOMANOVIC: Hello, hello, how are you?
LUDDEN: Zuhra Vukomanovic fled Bosnia's war, and was among the first wave of refugees in Fargo. A resident at Riverview retirement community helped her study for her CNA certification and now, Vukomanovic works right here at Riverview.
Ms. VUKOMANOVIC: You need something? How I help you?
Unidentified Woman: Well, you will have to help me get dressed.
LUDDEN: Vukomanovic says she loves her job. And for an organization that's done so much for her, she welcomes this chance for payback.
Jennifer Ludden, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
In schools around the country, the size of classes is growing. Half the districts responding to a recent poll say they're increasing class size because of budget pressures. Many schools fear this will hurt students.
As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, some education reformers say it doesn't have to.
LARRY ABRAMSON: Marguerite Roza analyzes school spending for the Gates Foundation. She has been watching districts deal with tight budgets through across-the-board cuts and other desperation moves. Roza believe schools don't have to view tight spending limits as a lose-lose proposition.
Dr. MARGUERITE ROZA (Senior Data and Economic Advisor, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation): The idea that money has no flexibility, I think, prevents district leaders from making some choices earlier on that would help them in the long run.
ABRAMSON: Roza is pushing for adoption of a number of efficiency measures that would help schools, even when fatter budgets return. One suggestion is to create a rigorous teacher evaluation system so that schools will know which teachers are most effective. One big benefit, says Roza, is that would allow districts to increase the size of some classes.
Dr. ROZA: If there's a trade-off between higher teacher quality or smaller class sizes, then we are better off going with higher teacher quality.
ABRAMSON: Now, research on class size is complicated. There's evidence that smaller classes can help learning, but only if you bring the numbers down below, say, 17 students. That's a number most districts can only dream of. When you already have 25 or 30 kids in a class, there's reason to believe that small increases might not matter.
Michelle Rhee is former chancellor of schools for the District of Columbia, and she now heads the advocacy group Students First. She also says that with the right preparation, bigger classes can be an effective way to save money.
Ms. MICHELLE RHEE (Founder and CEO, StudentsFirst.org): The way that I think would make sense is to identify the most highly effective teachers in a particular district and think about assigning a few more students to each of their classrooms.
ABRAMSON: But representatives for teachers groups say this is all a smokescreen.
Ms. RANDI WEINGARTEN (President, American Federation of Teachers): If somebody says they want to raise class size, they're doing it to cut the budget, not because it's actually going to help children.
Randi Weingarten is head of the American Federation of Teachers. Many teachers say its common sense. Larger classes mean students get less one-on-one attention and teachers have more work. And, Weingarten says, plenty of parents agree.
Ms. WEINGARTEN: Teachers and parents will tell you that the reason they want smaller class sizes is so that they can differentiate instruction.
ABRAMSON: To deal with the fact that some kids need special help because of learning problems or language differences.
Some schools are experimenting with other ways to reduce personnel costs without necessarily raising class sizes.
Rocketship Education has three charter schools in California. Founder John Danner says his schools save money by putting even the youngest kids into a learning lab for one period a day. There, they get carefully guided computer-based instruction and are supervised by a teacher's aide.
Mr. JOHN DANNER (Co-Founder and CEO, Rocketship Education): You only need three kindergarten teachers instead of four, because the fourth one's in learning lab, so you don't need a teacher for them.
ABRAMSON: Danner says part of the savings goes into extensive career development for teachers so they can be more effective.
Bigger class sizes can be a hard sell to parents, but some education reformers say parents may embrace this idea as preferable to cutting art classes or raising fees.
Larry Abramson, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Across the country, state lawmakers are calling for major changes in the way teachers are hired and fired. And New Jersey Governor Chris Christie wants to make it a lot easier to fire ineffective teachers by eliminating tenure - though the state's biggest teachers' union says his proposal is both unnecessary and misguided.
NPR's Claudio Sanchez has that story.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: Since his election in 2009, Governor Christie has been a relentless critic of tenure for school teachers.
Governor CHRIS CHRISTIE (Republican, New Jersey): Teaching can no longer be the only profession where you have no rewards for excellence, and no consequences for failure.
SANCHEZ: That's Christie delivering his State of the State address last week. Education was a big part of Christie's speech, but he zeroed in on tenure, saying that it had made it almost impossible for schools to get rid of bad teachers. The time to eliminate tenure is now, Christie said. And that has infuriated teachers.
Unidentified Woman: Bad teachers can be let go. I have seen it happen.
Gov. CHRISTIE: Really?
Unidentified Woman: Yes, I have. And I take great offense at your comment.
SANCHEZ: Christie's confrontations with teachers - like this one, at a town hall meeting last fall - are common.
Gov. CHRISTIE: The rules that are set up on tenure to get people - and to get people fired are so onerous - five years of legal fights, hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees...
(Soundbite of cheers and applause)
SANCHEZ: What's lost in these heated exchanges, experts say, is that Christie and teachers who defend tenure are both right.
Elena Silva has researched and written about tenure for the journal Education Sector.
Ms. ELENA SILVA (Senior Policy Analyst, Education Sector): Are there teachers that are grossly negligent or incompetent? Yes. And does tenure protect them? Yes. But that doesn't represent most teachers. And I think that's where the debate and the conversation needs to settle down, I guess.
SANCHEZ: Tenure hearings are actually pretty rare in K-through-12 education. Most teachers who are fired don't challenge their dismissal. Still, the debate over tenure is healthy, as long as people understand what it is and what it's not, says Silva. Tenure is not a lifetime job guarantee.
Ms. SILVA: In K-12, tenure is primarily related to due process.
SANCHEZ: In most school systems, teachers who've been in the classroom less than three years can be fired, and have no right to appeal. Except for Texas, Wisconsin and Mississippi, tenure laws in the other 47 states give teachers who've been teaching more than three years the right to contest their firing. They have the right to legal representation; the right to testify before a hearing, and present witnesses in their defense.
The problem is that this can drag on, sometimes for years. Even union leaders agree: This has to change.
Barbara Keshishian is president of the New Jersey Education Association.
Ms. BARBARA KESHISHIAN (President, New Jersey Education Association): If the process needs to be speeded up, less expensive, then let's address those issues. But you don't throw away a process that otherwise works.
SANCHEZ: Keshishian says her union is working with state legislators to shorten tenure hearings from a year to 90 days or less, which would significantly reduce costs. But Governor Christie has said this does not go far enough.
Keshishian charges that Christie has been portraying the union as intransigent, and protective of incompetent teachers.
Ms. KESHISHIAN: The governor chooses the extreme cases, just a handful of cases, to inflame the debate. He's very good at doing that.
SANCHEZ: The top lawyer for the National Education Association, Alice O'Brien, says it's not in anyone's interest to protect bad teachers. But even they have the right to due process.
Ms. ALICE O'BRIEN (General Counsel, National Education Association): No teacher wants to be put out of the classroom, not told why they're being put out of the classroom, and not given the opportunity to quickly and fairly clear their name.
SANCHEZ: O'Brien says this is why the NEA will fight any effort to eliminate tenure - not just in New Jersey, but in the handful of states where it's likely to be challenged this year: Florida, Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana.
Researcher Elena Silva says the debate over tenure is gradually focusing on improving the teacher-evaluation process. Because if tenure laws are backed up by good evaluation policies, she says, that will help talented, effective teachers remain in the classroom.
Ms. SILVA: The problem is that we don't have good ways right now of measuring effectiveness.
SANCHEZ: Until we do, Silva says, there will be conflicting views about the need for tenure, and politicians will continue to call for its elimination.
Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
More than 14 million people in the U.S. are currently out of work. Economists say it will years before most Americans who want a job can find one. In terms of the labor market and the unemployment rate, St. Louis, Missouri, looks much like the nation as a whole.
And over the next year here on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, we'll be following six people who live in the greater St. Louis area. All are unemployed, and all are searching for work.
Today, NPR's Tamara Keith takes us to St. Louis, and begins our yearlong portrait of the unemployed.
TAMARA KEITH: Until March, Casaundra Bronner worked for one of the largest employers in St. Louis - certainly, the most famous - Anheuser-Busch. Bronner had been there 11 years, working her way up to a marketing manager job.
Ms. CASAUNDRA BRONNER: My last position, I really enjoyed it. And it was kind of a - like a rug taken from under me.
KEITH: Bronner was among hundreds the company laid off. She never thought it would take this long to find work. And the search is clearly wearing on her, both financially and emotionally. Bronner is 39, a single mother with two daughters in elementary school.
Ms. BRONNER: It's difficult because I'm what they have. You know, it's - well, you bought us that stuff before; how come we can't do it now?
KEITH: For Bronner and the five others we'll follow over the coming year, there is one, central goal.
Unidentified Man #1: I just - I just want to work.
Ms. BRONNER: I'll do what I have to do.
Unidentified Woman: Right now, I will take any job.
Unidentified Man #2: We will do what it takes. It's just - I can't find that place yet.
Ms. JENNIFER BARFIELD: I will take it just to get work.
KEITH: That last voice was Jennifer Barfield. She's an IT professional, and was laid off from her longtime job at a law firm back in March of 2009.
Ms. BARFIELD: It's hard to not be depressed. I don't know who couldn't be depressed if they were going through this.
KEITH: Barfield is 47 years old, and a newlywed.
Mr. BRIAN BARFIELD: My name is Brian Barfield. I've had my share of down, down, down - bad times. But having met Jen, it's starting to come around and look up, and it'll be fine.
KEITH: They met at the Go Network, a group for unemployed people in St. Louis. Then, last January, Brian proposed spontaneously.
Mr. BARFIELD: We were having dinner downtown and the lights were low, and she looked beautiful sitting there. And I just knew I was ready. And so I said, will you marry me?
KEITH: Now, they're in this together. Brian is 53, and spent his career in manufacturing. He worked for Chrysler and one of its suppliers until the carmaker shut down its operations in the St. Louis area. For most of the last year, he had another job, managing a warehouse. Then in October, right after a honeymoon spent at home to save money, he lost that job, too.
Ms. BARFIELD: Really, if just one of us could get a job, we could live a decent life until the other did. It's really frustrating to me that both of us don't have it.
KEITH: At this point, they're getting by on unemployment benefits and money pulled from Jennifer's 401(k). But her benefits will run out soon.
The clock is ticking on Randy Howland's benefits, too.
Mr. RANDY HOWLAND: This is my calendar. You can see I probably have two interviews a week, and maybe two others that are phone interviews or follow-ups -phone calls - and then I do networking.
KEITH: Howland is 50 years old, and has been out of work for more than a year.
Mr. HOWLAND: Yes, I'm one of those people that's been on unemployment for a long, long time.
KEITH: In that time, he's applied for more than 600 jobs - 600. He's quite tech savvy, and programmed his computer to fill in most of the blanks on the applications for him. The jobs are mostly in customer service and sales, offering low wages. Howland has a master's degree in telecommunications and peaked at a six-figure salary, back in 2002. The problem is the telecom industry, as he knew it, doesn't exist anymore.
Mr. HOWLAND: I've had people look at my resume that said, hey, no, no, no, you've got to remove that; that's technology from the, you know, '20s or something. It makes me look out of touch.
(Soundbite of baby) Ms. ANNICA TROTTER: Hi, big boy, hi. What are you doing?
KEITH: Annica Trotter is talking to her infant son, Gregory. He's smiley and alert. Trotter lost her job in October, shortly after her son was born. She had been working for a social services agency, helping people with disabilities find jobs. Now, she's applying those skills to her own job search, networking and checking with friends and family.
Ms. TROTTER: But right now, it just doesn't seem like there's anything available.
KEITH: Trotter is 25,�has two children and the kind of drive you wouldn't want to bet against. In addition to her job search, she's starting a baking business.
Ms. TROTTER: Cakes and cupcakes are the main things - muffins, quiches, pot pies, poundcakes.
KEITH: She's calling it the Bright Oven.
Ms. TROTTER: Instead of just waiting for someone to decide that they wanted to be my boss, I could kind of start to be my own boss. And I think that once I get a job, I know that I'll be able to do both.
KEITH: She's sure she'll land a new job in three months or less. That's what 54-year-old Ray Meyer thought, too. But he's been searching for work for more than two years - so long that he's run out of unemployment benefits.
Mr. RAY MEYER: I've done some small jobs for neighbors and some friends - as far as landscaping and painting and some physical labor kind of things, you know -to make ends meet.
KEITH: This after a 30-year career in banking. In his last job, Meyer was a regional manager. But then like so many small banks, the one he was working for ran into financial trouble. Since then, he's been on 25 job interviews, but none of them panned out. Still, he says, every time it felt so good to put on his banker's clothes again.
Mr. MEYER: When I had my shiny, little shoes on, and I'm ready to go to - for an interview, I feel like I'm on the top of the world. I really do. Isn't it sad?
KEITH: His wife still has her job; she's a teacher. Meyer gets up early every morning to pack her lunch. He does most of the housework now, just to keep himself busy between submitting resumes and following up on leads.
Mr. MEYER: It wears on you - it really does.
KEITH: We'll hear more from Ray, Brian, Jennifer, Randy, Casaundra and Annica in the weeks and months to come, as they search for jobs and hopefully, find them.
Tamara Keith, NPR News.
BLOCK: Sources for this project were identified with help from the�Public Insight Network of American Public Media,�the Nine Network of Public Media, the�St. Louis Beacon, and�St. Louis Public Radio.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
The House of Representatives returns to legislating this week. The House took a self-imposed timeout after the shooting rampage in Tucson in which six were killed and 13 injured, among them Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
First on the agenda is one of the most divisive bills of the session: a measure to repeal last year's health care overhaul. It's unclear how much the tenor of the debate will change in the aftermath of the shootings. One thing that is clear, as NPR's Julie Rovner reports, is that Democrats, now playing defense on the health law, are finally coalescing around a single message.
JULIE ROVNER: For Republicans, the message about the new health care law has been simple: It's bad. Here's House Speaker John Boehner at a news conference.
Representative JOHN BOEHNER (Republican, Ohio; Speaker of the House): It will ruin the best health care system in the world, it will bankrupt our nation, and it will ruin our economy.
ROVNER: And here's House Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier.
Representative DAVID DREIER (Republican, California): The words reckless and unsustainable hardly begin to cover it. This bill is an economic and fiscal disaster of unprecedented proportions.
ROVNER: In fact, the bill they'll vote on this week is called the Repealing the Job-killing Health Care Law Act.
Democrats, on the other hand, have had a much more difficult job selling the merits of the law. They've had to explain why the bill is good and what's actually in it. That's led lawmakers to resort to reciting lengthy laundry lists of provisions. Those have often done more to confuse than to enthuse the public.
George Lakoff is a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He says President Obama missed a big opportunity during the height of the debate. After a month of controversial town hall meetings around the country, the president gave a nationally-televised speech to try to reframe the health care bill. But Lakoff says instead of casting the effort as a moral imperative...
Professor GEORGE LAKOFF (Linguistics Professor, University of California Berkeley): ...he gave a speech on 24 points of policy.
ROVNER: And that's the big difference between the two parties when it comes to messaging.
Mr. LAKOFF: The conservatives create moral messages. The Democrats create policy messages. And policy messages either go over people's heads or bore them.
ROVNER: Lakoff says he's doesn't think Democrats are doing much better these days, but Bob Crittenden disagrees. Crittenden runs the Herndon Alliance, which has helped shape the message for dozens of groups that support the health law.
Mr. BOB CRITTENDEN (Herndon Alliance): There's a lot of interest in being very focused and disciplined about how we're going to talk to the American people.
ROVNER: Crittenden helped write a series of recommendations last summer to help backers of the law sell it to the public. A key one was to make it less complicated.
Mr. CRITTENDEN: Put the provisions of the health care bill into personal terms, through stories and real things or of how it really affects people.
ROVNER: And it seems like lawmakers are taking that advice. For example, Florida Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has taken to telling this story about one grateful constituent.
Representative DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ (Democrat, Florida): Recently I was in the grocery store, and a woman came up to me and literally put her hands on my shoulders and said: Debbie, thank you. Thank you for passing health care reform. You saved me $3,000 last year when I was able to put my two adult daughters back on my insurance plan.
ROVNER: Crittenden's group said backers of the law should also focus on parts of the law that have already gone into effect. That includes things like letting young adults get back on their parents' health plans, giving seniors bigger discounts on prescription drugs and giving small businesses tax credits if they offer health insurance to their workers.
Mr. CRITTENDEN: They're a very small part of the bill but crucial, and also, the American people love those things.
ROVNER: Lawmakers seem to be taking that advice, too. Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey highlighted what would happen to seniors' new drug benefits if Republicans succeed in repealing the law.
Representative ED MARKEY (Democrat, Massachusetts): GOP used to stand for Grand Old Party. Now it stands for Grandma's out of Prescriptions.
ROVNER: The Republican repeal bill is expected to pass the House easily but die in the Senate. Meanwhile, the messaging battle is likely to continue unabated.
Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
We're going now to the East Texas town of Marshall. Before the Civil War, it was the center of the state's plantation economy. The county, Harrison County, says it once had more plantations and more slaves than any other county in Texas. After Reconstruction, it also had more lynchings.
Well, today, like so many small towns in the area, Marshall is trying to reinvent itself as a tourist destination for weekenders from Dallas and Houston.
As NPR's Wade Goodwyn reports, it's doing that by highlighting a lesser known piece of Marshall history - its role in a musical revolution.
WADE GOODWYN: On the vast plantations of Marshall, Texas, cotton was king. But the beautiful fields of white were surrounded in every direction with lucrative pine forests. When slavery died writhing on the graves of 620,000 American soldiers, the black men in those logging camps suddenly became workers.
(Soundbite of music)
GOODWYN: And to try to keep these newly freed men from walking away to a better life, the logging camp owners built what were called barrel houses. They looked like an airplane hangar made out of a giant wooden barrel. In these places, a new sound was born, an early seed of rock 'n' roll. It was called by several names at first, but they finally settled on boogie woogie.
(Soundbite of music)
GOODWYN: To the white world of East Texas, this music was invisible. But plenty of upstanding churchgoing black women knew all about boogie woogie, and they thought it came straight from the devil. Say the name out loud and it even sounded godless.
Mr. DAVID ALEXANDER ELAM (Musician): My mother was just a stone-starched Baptist. She said, boy, you're not going to play that devil's music in my house. You know, if you're going to play music, you're going to church. So I needed to get on a piano, so that's where I went.
GOODWYN: David Alexander grew up in Marshall, Texas in the 1940s and '50s. Unfortunately, for his Baptist mother, his father was one of the best boogie woogie piano players in East Texas - not in the house, though.
Mr. ALEXANDER: I just used to watch him and his brothers in the backyard. You know, they'd be playing guitars and singing the blues like, you know, like, Robert Johnson and all them guys, you know?
GOODWYN: By the time Alexander was 17 in 1955, his fingers could fly over the keyboard. It was a dangerous time and place for young black men. The Civil Rights Movement was beginning to whisper across the South, and the flaming crosses of the Ku Klux Klan lit up the East Texas night.
Mr. ALEXANDER: One day, I was downtown, and then I saw two white dudes beating a black dude. Then the police drove up. And they got out and stood and looked at it a while, and then they turned their backs while the guy kept beating him, and they lit up cigarettes.
GOODWYN: Alexander watched as the black man was beaten to a pulp. He approached another black man who was also watching.
Mr. ALEXANDER: I said, man, ain't these people going to do something about it? He said, man, don't talk about it. It's a white folks thing, man. You'll wind up getting killed.
GOODWYN: But Alexander couldn't stop thinking and talking about what he'd seen. He was appalled and wanted the black community to hit back. His family and friends told him to get out of East Texas before he was found hanging in the woods. So that's what he did. He left for California with his talent in his pocket and never looked back and never came back either, ever.
(Soundbite of music)
GOODWYN: For the next five decades in Oakland and San Francisco, he made records and played nightclubs for an enthusiastic and increasingly integrated audience.
(Soundbite of music)
(Soundbite of train whistle)
GOODWYN: Back in Marshall, as the 1950s became the 1960s, the town began to struggle. The Texas & Pacific Railroad, which had headquarters in Marshall, began to shrivel and die. But the town still retained a Southern charm.
Buddy Power is fifth generation from Marshall. His predecessors were Confederate officers, and his father owned all the grocery stores in town until Wal-Mart put them out of business, but he is Marshall's mayor.
Mayor BUDDY POWER (Marshall, Texas): It was a wonderful place. We had the milling elevator, which was always cooking something. We had two bread companies. The aroma of the bread filled the whole town. Absolutely a close-knit family-type community. And we're hoping to get back there someday.
GOODWYN: Last year, fate intervened in the form of a San Antonio doctor. By day, Dr. John Tennison is a psychiatrist, but by night, Tennison is one of the country's leading boogie woogie aficionados. He's got thousands of recordings. And Tennison knew something about Marshall, Texas that Marshall itself had forgotten.
Dr. JOHN TENNISON: In Texas, historically, in the 19th century, African-Americans were present in the greatest numbers in Harrison County of which Marshall, of course, is the county seat. And oral histories indicate that boogie woogie was first played in the early 1870s, which is the same time in which the Texas & Pacific Railroad was getting its start.
GOODWYN: Tennison says those piano players moved from one logging camp to another on board the Texas & Pacific. And that's how boogie woogie started, the sound of the T&P locomotive running wide open through the backwoods.
(Soundbite of music)
GOODWYN: And on Martin Luther King Day 2010, John Tennison told Marshall about this amazing style of black music that had been born in their woods. Not a single person on the city council believed him, Mayor Buddy Power included.
Mayor POWER: I wouldn't say I was skeptical. I just didn't believe it.
(Soundbite of laughter)
GOODWYN: For Marshall's white community, this boogie woogie thing seemed like it had been dropped from Mars. For Marshall's black leaders, Tennison's presentation stirred something forgotten, like, oh, yeah, I remember that, even though maybe they didn't, really.
Although almost all the boogie woogie piano players with ties to the city had died, Tennison told them there was one guy in California who might still be alive. Finally convinced, Mayor Power and the city council asked Tennison to try to find this man named Alexander and ask if he would consider coming home.
Mr. ALEXANDER: I thought maybe it was a joke, you know? I said, what does this guy think - he think I'm stupid? Marshall, Texas? What you're going to do, hang me?
GOODWYN: It took a long time for Dr. Tennison to find Alexander.
When Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali, David Alexander changed his to Omar Sharriff.
Tennison told Sharriff: Marshall wanted him to come home for good and be the town's boogie woogie ambassador. They'd pay for an apartment and a stipend, and he would be exhibit A of a musical history Marshall had forgotten but now wanted to remember again.
Mr. ALEXANDER: We want to do something with you. We got some friends -people down there who admire you. I said, really? He said, yeah. He said, are you interested? I said, why not? I said, nobody around here interested in me.
GOODWYN: So, last month, Omar Sharriff came home to Marshall.
(Soundbite of song, "Great Balls of Fire")
Mr. ALEXANDER: (Singing) You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain. Too much love drives a man insane.
GOODWYN: His first two concerts were the biggest integrated gatherings in Marshall's history. When asked what event came in third, both blacks and whites in Marshall shook their heads like there really was no third place.
Sharriff's second concert in December attracted the attention of two of the best boogie woogie players in the country: Detroit's Bob Seeley and Bob Baldori, who flew in to play with Sharriff.
The concert hall was packed out the door. Omar Sharriff is having trouble processing it all.
Mr. ALEXANDER: The mayor, man, he said, call me Buddy. I said - he say, all my friends call me Buddy. I said to myself, well, this is the mayor of Marshall, Texas want me to be his friend? It's nothing like it used to be. It's another world.
GOODWYN: Thomas Wolfe says you can't go home again. But maybe if you wait 53 years, things will have changed just enough.
Wade Goodwyn, NPR News, Dallas.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
Haiti's former dictator, Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier, is the talk of that country after returning from 25 years in exile. Some Haitians cautiously welcomed him home, others sharply criticized his brutal regime.
In a move that surprised many observers of the country and many Haitians themselves, Duvalier flew in last evening carrying a government-issued Haitian diplomatic passport.
NPR's Jason Beaubien reports from Port-au-Prince.
JASON BEAUBIEN: Pierre Ralon(ph) shines shoes on a busy street in Port-au-Prince. Ralon has a very laissez-faire attitude to the return of one of Haiti's most brutal dictators.
Mr. PIERRE RALON: (Through Translator) The fact that Baby Doc is back, I don't feel any different. To me, I think it's a good thing that he's back. And if every other Haitian that's living out of the country comes back and participate in the reconstruction of the country, that will good.
Unidentified Group: Jean-Claude Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier, Jean-Claude Duvalier.
BEAUBIEN: Hundreds of people mobbed the gates to the airport last night chanting Jean-Claude Duvalier to welcome the former president for life home after 25 years in exile.
Haitian police escorted his motorcade to a luxury hotel in a leafy(ph) section of the capital. His people originally said he'd hold a press conference today at the hotel, but Henry Robert Sterling, an aide to Duvalier, announced that there wasn't a room big enough to accommodate such an event, and thus, Duvalier will address the media tomorrow.
Mr. HENRY ROBERT STERLING (Spokesman of Jean-Claude Duvalier): (Through Translator) Jean-Claude Duvalier does not have political role, as far as I know. He came back to his country as a citizen to visit his country after the earthquake. He is not involved in politics.
BEAUBIEN: Sterling says Duvalier has returned from Paris as a private citizen to visit friends, and it's unclear how long he'll be in the country.
Michel Soukar, political analyst at Signal FM, a popular local radio station, says Duvalier is back to stay. Soukar, who was forced into exile by Baby Doc in the 1980s, says the end of Duvalier's exile came out of the blue.
Mr. MICHEL SOUKAR (Political Analyst, Signal FM): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: This was a surprise to everyone, Soukar says, except those who were preparing in secret for his return. And Soukar says it's clear to him that Haitian President Rene Preval and the highest levels of the French government must have approved Duvalier flying back in. Haiti is in the midst of a major political crisis with the November presidential elections still undecided. Soukar says Duvalier's arrival benefits current President Preval.
Mr. SOUKAR: (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: This is going to create a diversion in Preval's favor, Soukar says. Others, however, view Duvalier's presence as more than just a diversion. Amnesty International today issued a call for Baby Doc to be arrested and charged with human rights abuses and crimes against humanity.
Patrick Elie, a former defense minister in President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's first government, says he doesn't want Duvalier arrested, but he says the former dictator owes the Haitian people an explanation.
Mr. PATRICK ELIE (Former Haitian Defense Minister): How did I live all my life in terror?
BEAUBIEN: He says Baby Doc and his father, Francois Papa Doc Duvalier, brutally repressed anyone who spoke out against their regimes.
Mr. ELIE: Tell us, how families got killed? How torture was practiced in this country? How so many Haitians were forced into exile? We want to know. That's it.
BEAUBIEN: Elie says Duvalier's return doesn't benefit the Haitian people, but he says it does have the potential to cause chaos in a country already dealing with an earthquake, a cholera epidemic and charges of massive fraud in November's presidential elections.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
In Tunisia today, a new coalition government was unveiled. The move is meant to quell civil unrest that led to the ouster last week of the country's longtime president. The coalition includes some opposition groups for the first time. But it also retains key members of the ousted regime. And there is no mention of new elections.
Officials acknowledge they'll have a tough time persuading Tunisians who want a clean start to give this new government a chance.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is in the capital, Tunis, and sent this report.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Tunisian opposition member Ahmad Buasi(ph) acknowledges the coalition is far from perfect - even if it does, for the first time, include groups like his progressive Democratic Party. He says about a third of the new government worked for the old regime, including Prime Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi, as well as the foreign defense and interior ministers, all longtime allies of the Tunisian president who fled last week.
But Buasi is adamant any regime members who are keeping their jobs are technocrats whose hands are quote, not dirty. He adds the coalition is temporary, but vital to keeping the country running until elections can be held.
Mr. AHMED BUASI (Member, Democratic Party): And we will be going around the country to explain to people what's going on, that we keep their demands with us. And we will not participate in any election that does not respond to their demands.
NELSON: But persuading Tunisians to accept their new government isn't going to be easy.
(Soundbite of protest)
NELSON: Even before the new coalition government was announced, about a thousand people gathered in Independence Square in the capital, to protest against it. One of the protesters was Realtor Mosan Matthews(ph).
Mr. MOSAN MATTHEWS: They're trying to keep the same system.
Mr. LUTFIT BIN AZIZA(ph): (Speaking foreign language)
NELSON: Fellow protester Lutfit bin Aziza adds he and others here won't let the revolution be co-opted. He says they won't be satisfied until every last vestige of former President Zain al-Abadin bin Ali's government is gone.
Mr. HALID HAMILA(ph): We are not afraid. We are not afraid.
NELSON: That's Halid Hamila, who waived his fist at an army helicopter overhead.
(Soundbite of helicopter)
Mr. HAMILA: No fear. No more fear. It's the country of freedom. This is a free country.
NELSON: Still, Hamila believes Tunisians should give the coalition government a chance.
Mr. HAMILA: This is my opinion, and I think it's the opinion of so many citizens -who think that what we need right now is peace.
NELSON: Hamila believes the coalition has a responsibility, too. He says the new government must waste no time getting the country back on track.
Mr. HAMILA: I need to go back to work. I need my students to come back to my classes. I need to see bread everywhere, to see food everywhere. You see, if they are patriots, if they love this country, they should do the same as I'm telling you now.
(Soundbite of protesters)
NELSON: The protest continued for more than an hour. A crowd of several hundred people gathered to sing the Tunisian national anthem. Later, security forces used water cannons and tear gas, and fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd. A curfew is once again in effect across the capital this evening, in hopes of keeping looting to a minimum.
Mr. NAJIB SHABI (Minister of Local Development, Tunisia): (Speaking foreign language)
NELSON: Najib Shabi, an opposition member who is part of the new coalition, appeared on Tunisian state television to urge calm, and to assure Tunisians that their demands will be heard. The interim coalition has also called for the release of political prisoners. They've also announced the creation of several commissions to investigate corruption as well as abuses during the popular uprising.
What was notably absent from all the speeches and press releases was the mention of any elections to establish a permanent government. Under Tunisia's constitution, those elections need to be held in 60 days. But some opposition members say more time is needed to put in place measures to ensure the polls are free and fair.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Tunis.
BLOCK: A word now about a disturbing pattern across North Africa. In Tunisia, those protests began after a street vendor set himself on fire. He was reportedly protesting police harassment. His fruit and vegetable stand had been confiscated by police because he didn't have the right permits.
Well, in Egypt, a restaurant owner set himself on fire in front of parliament today. He survived with light burns after witnesses put out the flames with fire extinguishers. In Mauritania, a man also set himself on fire, and died in front of the parliament building. And in Algeria, there have been multiple reports of similar incidents.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs, said today that he's taking another leave of absence from the company for medical reasons, though he did not provide any further details about his health. In recent years, Jobs has survived pancreatic cancer and underwent a liver transplant.
As NPR's Jim Zarroli reports, the announcement is raising fresh questions about the fate of the company Steve Jobs founded.
JIM ZARROLI: Jobs made his announcement in a six-sentence email to his staff this morning. He said he loved Apple so much and hoped to be back as soon as possible, but he didn't say when that might be. In the meantime, the company will be headed by Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook, who performed the same function during one of Jobs' previous leaves.
But Steve Jobs says he will still weigh in on major strategic decisions. James McQuivey is an analyst at Forrester Research.
Mr. JAMES MCQUIVEY (Analyst, Forrester Research): He is the soul and energy of the company. And so it's very, very hard to imagine that this time out, if he's away, he's still not going to be receiving phone calls and guiding the company in his absence.
ZARROLI: In his email, Jobs asked people to respect his privacy. But that's unlikely to stop speculation about his condition and the company's future. Jobs is a central figure at Apple who has presided over the creation of hugely successful products, like the iPod and the iPhone. The last time he took a leave, the company's stock price plummeted, though it later recovered.
U.S. financial markets were closed today for the holiday. But in Frankfurt, where Apple shares are also sold, they fell more than 8 percent.
Jim Zarroli, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
(Soundbite of music)
BLOCK: Take a deep breath. Those four words are the first thing you see when you launch the desktop application for Skype, the company that helped pioneer a marriage between the telephone and the Internet. Skype was founded in 2003 as an alternative to expensive phone plans. With the program you can use your Internet connection to make voice calls, video calls, as well send instant messages.
Today Skype has about 560 million registered users and most of them don't pay a dime for their service. Well, joining us from London to talk about his company is Skype's CEO Tony Bates. Welcome to the program.
Mr. TONY BATES (CEO, Skype): Thank you, Melissa, it's great to be here.
BLOCK: What about that message, take a deep breath, what does that mean?
Mr. BATES: I think that's a great metaphor for Skype, actually, because what Skype really tries to stand for and what we've been doing, as you mentioned, from the advent of when we were really just focused on audio and taking it to video is really create something that we think is both universal, but also wonderful in terms of experiences that we enable.
BLOCK: So, take a deep breath meaning this is going to take your breath away or where is that metaphor heading?
Mr. BATES: Yeah. I think if you think about what Skype has done, and you mentioned some great numbers, but just to give you a couple of other data points, we on average per month have about - in the last three months we were hitting 145 million connected users who use the service in one way or another. And about 40 percent of those now are doing that with video. You don't have to imagine anymore what's possible.
We hear these great use cases, you know, the Army ranger who's serving in Afghanistan who's watching the birth of their daughter back in the U.S. Folks who are watching real time what's - maybe in Tulsa, watching what's happening, you know, in current events just like we've seen over the last few days in Tunisia. So people are using it for both magical sort of wonderful moments, but more importantly, also useful moments.
BLOCK: Let's talk a bit about the company that Skype recently acquired for $100 million and that's Qik. It lets users stream video from their smartphones. How does acquiring Qik help Skype? Is that a new model?
Mr. BATES: Well, I would says two parts about that. Firstly, as I mentioned, we think the next great sort of place to go is really sharing these magical moments that we talked about in a mobile context. And Qik does two things for us. One, it allows us to reach a broad set of mobile devices. Qik is actually available in over 200 different mobile phones running across all of the major operating systems, Android, iOS, Symbian and so on.
But, also, Qik is also about capturing these moments that I talked about earlier. And so you can now capture the video, provide a link to a live feed up to say, 20 people, as well as then come back and look at that later in an archive sense. Qik really adds strength to our mobile video platform overall. Mobile video is the next great area frontier for Skype.
BLOCK: Do you think that you might be a little bit late to the mobile party? I mean, how do you rank among those competitors who are already really active in that?
Mr. BATES: We launched our two-way video iPhone app. So that's an upgrade from what we had before in the marketplace. And we did it on New Year's Eve 'cause it's one of the most important video calling days of the year, maybe the most important day. And just to share with you some statistics, in the first 24 hours, we had 4 million downloads and 1 million Skype video calls.
And I think what differentiates us is that universal nature of Skype. Skype's available on television. Skype's available on desktops. Skype's available on a myriad of mobile phones. The reach is just the thing that I think is long-term differentiated for us.
BLOCK: Tony Bates, you're a relative newcomer to Skype. You started as CEO just a few months ago. And you came from an established powerhouse in the tech industry, from Cisco Systems, which is pretty much a traditional company with a really sturdy business model, making money from the sale of hardware and software. Why would you leave something like that, something that's known for a company where most of its users, as we said, get something for nothing they don't pay a cent?
Mr. BATES: Yeah, I think, firstly, Cisco's a wonderful company. And I was lucky enough to be there when it was a much smaller company and see it go from kind of the revenues that Skype is approaching through to obviously tens of billions of dollars a year. But what I would tell you is that it's a software company that can iterate and move very quickly with the market. We can enter mobile, we can enter the next generation living room.
But what I love about it is that we're providing more than just an established business model. We're looking at ways that we really shape and change the world. We really could bring education into classrooms. And that's important to me as well. We did a project with the U.N. HDR, in terms of how do we connect refugee camps together in very remote locations where the telecommunications infrastructure is not very strong? And maybe the refugee worker only got to spend, you know, literally 10 minutes a month just having the ability to even communicate by phone, let alone video. And we enabled that solution.
So for me that's very important. And I think we're just at the beginning of that. You know, these are big numbers, 145 million. But there's a lot of the planet that isn't there yet. And so, you know, the vision at the end of the day is to really link the planet in more, instead hundreds of millions using our service every month, more like billions.
BLOCK: Well, Tony Bates, thanks for talking with us today.
Mr. BATES: You're very welcome.
BLOCK: Tony Bates is the CEO of Skype.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Im Melissa Block.
TED ROBBINS: Congresswoman Giffords underwent two surgeries over the weekend: one to place a tracheal tube, to keep her lungs and airway clear; the other to remove bone chips, which were putting pressure on her eye. No complications from either procedure - just remarkable progress. One of her doctors confirmed that Giffords reached out and gave her husband, Mark Kelly, a neck rub. It's another sign, said Dr. Michael Lemole, that higher cognitive levels of function are at least somehow preserved.
As NPR's Ted Robbins reports, this year, the holiday took on added significance.
TED ROBBINS: Congresswoman Giffords underwent two surgeries over the weekend. One to place a tracheal tube to keep her lungs and airway clear, the other to remove bone chips which were putting pressure on her eye. No complications from either procedure, just remarkable progress. One of her doctors confirmed that Giffords reached out and gave her husband, Mark Kelly, a neck rub. It's another sign, said Dr. Michael Lemole, that higher cognitive levels of function are at least somehow preserved.
In an interview with ABC, Mark Kelly said giving him a massage showed her -wifes health is improving, and that her spirit is strong. He said he let it happen because it was something she needed to do.
Dr. Randall Friese was asked if the congresswoman is speaking.
Dr. RANDALL FRIESE (Trauma Surgeon, University Medical Center): The tracheostomy that we have in place now does not allow her to get air past her vocal cords. She cannot vocalize, but she certainly could mouth words or something like that, when she's ready to do that.
ROBBINS: Dr. Lemole said that if things continue the way theyve been going, it could be a matter of days or weeks before Giffords leaves the hospital for a long-term rehabilitation facility. The location hasnt been determined yet.
Dr. MICHAEL LEMOLE (Chief of Neurosurgery, University Medical Center): Well, the family is looking at all their resources. They have the entire country available. It has to be in a place that is not only top-notch, in terms of the ability to render care and rehabilitation, but also proximity to family is very important.
(Soundbite of crowd singing, This Little Light of Mine)
ROBBINS: Just a few blocks from the hospital, several hundred people gathered this morning to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Giffords colleague, Arizona Democratic congressman Raul Grijalva, said:
Representative RAUL GRIJALVA (Democrat, Arizona): There's a backdrop to this celebration today. And that backdrop is what happened here in Tucson, with the tragedy that we're all dealing with. And it's an appropriate time to remind ourselves of what Dr. King meant, said and lived.
ROBBINS: Tucson City councilman Richard Fimbres gave the invocation.
Mr. RICHARD FIMBRES (City Councilman, Tucson): Please, let us pray for the six that have fallen. And let's pray for the folks that are struggling in the hospital still, to get healed; and let's pray for their families. But let's also pray for this city of Tucson and for this state, that we come together as one family, and we continue to work together in the spirit of true Arizonans.
ROBBINS: Then the crowd marched to a park a few miles away. People carried signs saying: Get Well Gabby, and Peace, and May Tucson Be the Birthplace of the Civil Discourse Movement.
Doris Ford said she was glad to see such a range of ages in the crowd.
Ms. DORIS FORD: I love the fact that you still see neighbors bringing their children to an event like this - 'cause they could have been scared off.
ROBBINS: She said she was here to accent the positive.
Ms. FORD: I am out here to honor the people - the heroes of Tucson - and all the goodness in the world.
ROBBINS: With Giffords' condition upgraded over the weekend from critical to serious, the entire crowd seemed hopeful.
Ted Robbins, NPR News, Tucson.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Americans love heroes. Celebrating a hero is often our way of making some sense of tragedy. It was just a matter of hours between the shooting rampage in Tucson and Americas introduction to Daniel Hernandez. He is the 20-year-old intern who rushed to the aid of congresswoman Giffords, and he may well have saved her life.
His heroics thrust Hernandez into the national spotlight. At the memorial service last week for the six people killed in the rampage, he sat next to President Obama.
Well, Daniel Hernandez, who is openly gay, got us thinking about another hero more than three decades ago, whose life ended sadly after he prevented a national tragedy. His name was Oliver "Billy" Sipple. He was a Marine, twice wounded in Vietnam, also gay, and he saved President Gerald Ford from an assassin's gun.
Dan Morain has written through the years about Billy Sipple. He's political affairs columnist at the Sacramento Bee, and he joins me now. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DAN MORAIN (Columnist, Sacramento Bee): Thank you, happy to be here.
BLOCK: And Dan, why dont we go back to the day - September 22nd, 1975 - in Union Square, San Francisco. What happened?
Mr. MORAIN: Well, President Ford was addressing a conference at the St. Francis Hotel in downtown San Francisco. And as he walked out, Sara Jane Moore pulled out a gun and aimed. Billy Sipple, who just happened to be there, saw it. He yelled something, and then he grabbed her hand and grabbed her gun.
BLOCK: And Billy Sipple, at the time was, 33 years old. Tell us about his life leading up to that moment.
Mr. MORAIN: Before "don't ask don't tell," there were guys like Sipple in the military, and they simply hid. He served his tour in Vietnam. He was wounded twice - once in the head. Upon his discharge, he moved to San Francisco; he'd grown up in Michigan. He was a high school dropout. He was dyslexic. So he had, you know, he had some issues.
Moved out to San Francisco because he knew there, he'd be accepted. He worked on the campaigns of Harvey Milk and was around town during those years, in the 1970s and then on through this incident in 1975.
BLOCK: Youve written in your stories over the years, Dan, that people in the gay community - some well-known political figures, among them, Harvey Milk in San Francisco saw an opportunity here, that this was someone who was gay, who was a hero. And he was outed in the press.
Mr. MORAIN: Well, thats right. Herb Caen, who was probably the most famous columnist in San Francisco ever, quoted Harvey Milk as saying that Oliver Sipple was gay and they were very proud of this because it showed that - you know, this is 1975; this is before gays were being accepted, even in San Francisco. He was making a point that gays could be heroic figures.
Unfortunately - for Sipple - though, while he was out in San Francisco, at least some members of his family back in Michigan were unaware.
BLOCK: What happened within Oliver "Billy" Sipples family after it became known that he was a homosexual man?
Mr. MORAIN: His father didnt want anything to do with him. I was told that when his mother died, he was not really welcome at the funeral.
BLOCK: It seems pretty clear, from what youve written over the years, that Sipple had a number of psychological problems before this event. After the war, he was on disability pay. By the time he died - he was just 47 years old when he died - what had his life become?
Mr. MORAIN: You know, he had really lost control. As a Marine, he obviously would have been in great shape. But by 1989 when he died, he was 298 pounds. So he had become really, quite obese at the end.
He lived in an apartment at the edge of the Tenderloin - not a very nice part of San Francisco. He would get up in the morning, and he would go to one of two bars over on Polk Street, a few blocks away, and he would drink.
BLOCK: He had in the apartment in the Tenderloin, he had a framed letter hanging on the wall.
Mr. MORAIN: Yes.
BLOCK: What was that?
Mr. MORAIN: Well, he was not discovered until the beginning of February, about -I think - February 3rd, 1989. He died on his bed, and there was one letter signed, framed from Gerald Ford. And it thanked him for preventing violence on that day.
Now, who knows in retrospect why Gerald Ford never invited him to the White House, but he never did. And certainly at the time, there was criticism from Harvey Milk and others that the reason he was not invited and welcomed into the nations house, that the reason was that he was gay.
After his death, you know, I wrote a story a few days later. And I called President Fords secretary to see if President Ford would have anything to say about this and was told, well, we'll see what we can do. I waited a few days and nothing happened, and so the story ran.
A few days later, though, President Ford sent a letter two letters one went to Mr. Sipples brother, and one went to the bar where Sipple had hung out.
BLOCK: What did it say?
Mr. MORAIN: Well, it said that he was very sorry to hear about Oliver Sipples death, and the circumstances of that death.
BLOCK: Did Billy Sipple talk about whether he saw himself as a hero - and the limelight, the attention that came to him - as a result of what he did back in 1975?
Mr. MORAIN: He would, on occasion, talk about it. But he also said that he thought that that was something anybody would have done in that same circumstance. I dont think that thats true, but it certainly is the case that he acted. I think he understated what it was he did.
BLOCK: Dan Morain, thank you very much.
Mr. MORAIN: You're quite welcome.
BLOCK: Dan Morain is political affairs columnist with the Sacramento Bee. We were talking about Oliver "Billy" Sipple, who stopped an assassination attempt on President Ford in 1975.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And for others looking for opportunities to pay back, well, there were plenty today. It is, of course, Martin Luther King Day. It's also a congressionally designated National Day of Service.
Here in Washington, the first family joined volunteers who were painting at Stuart Hobson Middle School. President Obama also offered a few words.
President BARACK OBAMA: Doctor King obviously had a dream of justice and equality in our society, but he also had a dream of service, that you could be a drum major for service. You could lead by giving back.
BLOCK: We checked in with volunteers in several other places around the country today. First, to South Portland, Maine.
Ms. ALEXA PLOTKIN: I believe it is 14 degrees out today.
BLOCK: And so Alexa Plotkin is with a group of AmeriCorps alumni helping to weatherize homes. The hardest job so far? Installing window plastic.
Ms. PLOTKIN: It's quite a cumbersome process to get that on. It's a very fine art to get basically Saran Wrap onto windows.
BLOCK: In Little Rock, Arkansas, Chiante Fletcher(ph) is organizing a group of kids at the Helping Hands Thrift Store.
Ms. CHIANTE FLETCHER: So they're hanging up clothing. They're going through diapers and baby clothes, and they're organizing that. They're cleaning.
BLOCK: Not things kids normally like doing, but today, says Fletcher, is no normal day.
Ms. FLETCHER: They're in high spirits, and they're laughing, and they're clowning. They're having a good time. And the kids come back year after year.
BLOCK: Finally to Redlands, California. Chris Becktel of the group Music Changing Lives is unveiling a mural today that he painted with the help of students.
Mr. CHRIS BECKTEL: Starts off with Martin Luther King, and it goes through Cesar Chavez, and we've got the Lincoln Memorial up.
BLOCK: They'll dedicate the mural by playing a recording of Dr King's most famous speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial nearly half a century ago.
Dr. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: When we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Back in 1986 when Jean-Claude Duvalier was forced to flee Haiti, the writer Amy Wilentz was there in Port-au-Prince, and her reporting in the tumultuous years that followed turned into a book titled "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier."
Amy Wilentz has just returned from a trip to Haiti. She joins us from Los Angeles.
And, Amy, what was your reaction when you heard that Baby Doc was back?
Ms. AMY WILENTZ (Author, "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier"): Well, it's like a recurring nightmare for me. I mean, I thought that was the one thing we could be sure of - was that he was gone. Although there were always hints throughout the years that he wanted to come back to Haiti, both because he loves his country - I'm sure, as so many of us do - and because he was a political figure. But I was really shocked, and I thought, oh, this is not the right moment. Haven't we had enough earthquakes without having him return?
BLOCK: Take me back to 1986 and those days leading up to the ouster of Jean-Claude Duvalier. What was going on?
Ms. WILENTZ: Well, there was unrest in the streets. His human rights abuse record is really not a pretty one. This is not a man who should be whitewashed. He was better than his father, who was a really bloody dictator, but he was not a decent leader for any country, and there was a lot of unrest in the streets.
His police force, the Tonton Macoutes, were particularly brutal as they realized their regime was coming to an end. And then, the international community got together along with the Haitian civil society and finally said, okay, this is enough. You have to go.
And then, he left on a U.S. cargo plane driving his BMW with his wife and all his trunks right into the plane, and they went to France.
BLOCK: It's really quite something to think about, that he was just 19 years old when he became president for life, when his father, Papa Doc, died...
Ms. WILENTZ: That's right.
BLOCK: ...and was still a very young man when he left the country the first time.
Ms. WILENTZ: Right. I think he was about 35 when he left, and he was basically knighted by his father. His father put his hand on Jean-Claude's shoulder and said, you know, he will follow me. So he took the reins of what was a fairly pharaonic dictatorship, and he was too young for it. And so his father's advisers really ran him as if he were a dauphin in France, you know?
BLOCK: You described him as less brutal, perhaps, than his father. Why don't you talk about the level of brutality and corruption during his time in Haiti?
Ms. WILENTZ: His father was like a very vivid nightmare dictator, you know, very bloody, very vicious and violent, and felt that if he showed a certain level of violence, you could then rule without question. Baby Doc came into power at a different time. In the world's history, he couldn't really do that kind of thing, so it was a little more temperate, yet he imprisoned people who disagreed with him. He brooked also no political dissent. There was no freedom of the press. His elections were utterly false.
BLOCK: Well, how do you explain that Baby Doc has been allowed back into Haiti now?
Ms. WILENTZ: It's hard to explain. I think it may have taken some people by surprise. And then once it was a fact on the ground, I think it was a little bit difficult to understand what to do immediately.
But I think that he stepped into a political vacuum where everybody is so freaked out anyway by the earthquake and the cholera epidemic and then the elections that are sort of semi-failed elections that they're not really thinking about him, and they weren't thinking about him. And then suddenly, there he is.
BLOCK: There would be, Amy, a whole generation of Haitians now with no memory of the Duvalier regime, right?
Ms. WILENTZ: That's right. I would say 35 years old and younger, which is, I think, more than 50 percent of the Haitian population, would have very little idea of who he is or what he really represents. Their parents may have told them or not, and they only know the upheaval of the sort of trudge to democracy that Haiti has been on since Duvalier left. So maybe in some way, he looks reassuring or fatherly to them. He certainly didn't look that way when he left Haiti.
BLOCK: I've been talking with writer Amy Wilentz, author of the book "The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier."
Amy, thank you very much.
Ms. WILENTZ: Thanks so much, Melissa.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
As Americans celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. today, there are reminders of Dr. King's legacy everywhere you look. Countless parks, schools and streets across the country bear the name of the slain civil rights leader. But in Minneapolis, a dispute over a proposed off-leash dog area in a park named for King shows that achieving racial unity is still a work in progress.
Brandt Williams, of Minnesota Public Radio, reports.
BRANDT WILLIAMS: In south Minneapolis, Martin Luther King Park has baseball and softball diamonds, basketball and tennis courts, and it has one of the best sledding hills around. But it lacks something that dog owner Ben Harris has long hoped for: an area where his two, rather excitable dogs can run free.
(Soundbite of two men talking to a dog)
WILLIAMS: Harris lives near the park but usually doesn't walk the dogs here. Harris says a fenced in, off-leash area would provide space for dogs to run around and socialize with other dogs. The same goes for people.
Mr. BEN HARRIS: If you've ever had a puppy come bouncing right over to you with a person right behind them, a conversation usually starts. Whether that's somebody you might normally speak with or not - probably not -you're still going to have a conversation. And all of a sudden, you have a connection.
WILLIAMS: Much of the controversy seems to break along racial lines. For Harris, who is white, bonding with other dog owners is one small way to help achieve Martin Luther King's dream of uniting people of diverse racial backgrounds.
But most of the opponents are African-American. And many say they are offended by the idea of a dog park here. They say images of dogs attacking black marchers during civil rights protests in the '50s and '60s are still vivid.
Mary Merrill Anderson is leading a meeting at the park, designed to keep the dog park conflict from splitting the community. Meeting participants are young and old, black and white. The focus of the night's gathering is to brainstorm about ways to use the park to better honor the legacy of its namesake.
Anderson says the meeting was necessary because the opposing views over the dog park revealed a disturbing racial divide.
Ms. MARY MERRILL ANDERSON: I think it made people realize how different our worldview in community was, how different we understood the reality of our community. And it's like people were talking to each other, and we just were not able to connect at all.
WILLIAMS: If it's approved by the Minneapolis park board, the dog park will not be the first to be affiliated with the name Martin Luther King Jr. There are off-leash areas in parks named for King in Corvallis, Oregon, and Sausalito, California. It's difficult to determine just how many streets, parks and schools around the nation are named after King.
[POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: The title of Tilove's book is "Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street."]
Jonathan Tilove wrote the book "Along Martin Luther King: Travels on Black America's Main Street." Tilove says there are nearly 900 streets that bear the civil rights legend's name. He says since businesses often take on the name of the street where they're located, he did see some uses for King's name that might be considered less than ideal.
WILLIAMS: I did see, you know, MLK laundromat, MLK barber - you know. So yes, it's sort of the second generation of businesses on that street using that as part of their title.
WILLIAMS: Tilove says people didn't complain that these uses of King's name were inappropriate, but he suspects there are limits. For instance, Tilove says he didn't see any MLK liquor stores.
But some activists worry that King's name is being attached to things that he fiercely opposed. Author and activist Bob Zellner knew and marched alongside Martin Luther King. He says lots of things are being attributed to Dr. King that he would disapprove of.
Mr. BOB ZELLER: I think the Defense Department just came out with some kind of statement about Dr. King would understand the war in Afghanistan. I'm pretty sure he would not.
WILLIAMS: The statement was made by the Defense Department's general counsel, Jeh Johnson. As for barbershops, laundromats or even dog parks, Zellner says King saw himself as a man of the people and in most cases, probably wouldn't mind his name being associated with them.
For NPR News, I'm Brandt Williams in Minneapolis.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
So seven hours of debate on the health care bill starting tomorrow, and one question is: Will the tone of that debate be different given the calls for greater civility in politics following the shooting rampage in Tucson?
Kasie Hunt with Politico joins me to talk about what to expect in Congress coming up. Kasie, welcome to the program.
Ms. KASIE HUNT (National Political Reporter, Politico): Thanks, Melissa.
BLOCK: And what do you say? Will we be hearing a different tone in this debate on health care and debates going forward?
Ms. HUNT: Well, you know, it remains to be seen. I mean, we've seen numbers of violent incidents like that throughout the course of our history, and I think people have continued to complain about the tone in Washington.
That said, you know, we've already seen Speaker Boehner, who is obviously the new speaker of the House, sort of change his rhetoric a little bit around this bill that's supposed to repeal, quote-unquote, "Obamacare."
Instead of calling it job-killing legislation, he put a post up on his blog on the Internet, and it says, instead, job-destroying legislation. It uses other euphemisms, aside from killing.
BLOCK: You think destroying is more civil than killing?
Ms. HUNT: Well, I mean, I guess it depends on how you characterize exactly what happened in Tucson. But it is a shift from what he was doing before.
BLOCK: We're also hearing about some crossing of the aisle coming up for the president's State of the Union address on January 25th. At least two senators so far have said they will sit side by side - Senator Charles Schumer of New York, the Democrat, and Tom Coburn, a Republican of Oklahoma, will be sitting next to each other - which doesn't usually happen in those speeches. Do you think that's significant? Is it anything more than symbolic, Kasie?
Ms. HUNT: Well, I mean, I think we'll have to see. It's definitely an interesting step, especially coming from those two senators, who are, frankly, two of the champions of partisan rhetoric.
And of course, you know, for folks who watch that - those speeches on TV, you know, you normally see half the chamber stand up and cheer while the other half sits down.
You know, when we come to the State of the Union, we'll see these two guys sitting next to each other from different parties. Typically, the chambers are split, you know, on partisan sides.
And when President Obama addressed both chambers back in September of 2009, Joe Wilson shouted you lie when he discussed immigration portions of that bill.
So, you know, I doubt you'll see any partisan, rancorous outbursts at the State of the Union like have been seen in other speeches of this magnitude.
BLOCK: There was, Kasie, an interesting op-ed piece yesterday by Senator John McCain, President Obama's opponent, of course, in the 2008 presidential election, quite a full-throated defense of the president. He called his speech in Tucson terrific, and here's what he said about President Obama:
I believe he is a patriot, sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country's cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or are opposed to its founding ideals.
How much do you think John McCain represents the sense of Congress right now?
Ms. HUNT: You know, it's interesting. There have been a lot of folks who have read through that John McCain piece and said, you know, this is the most conciliatory he's been towards Barack Obama since he gave his concession speech back in 2008.
And McCain actually took it upon himself in that piece to say, you know, I am in part responsible for the nasty tone that has pervaded Washington and really stepped up and said, you know, we all bear some responsibility for fixing this.
So I think that he is a very interesting vanguard for leaders on both sides of the aisle in favor of a return to more conciliatory rhetoric.
BLOCK: Kasie Hunt, national political reporter for Politico. Thank you very much.
Ms. HUNT: Thanks, Melissa.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As we report elsewhere in today's program, President Obama is ordering a review of federal regulations. He'd like to root out rules that are outmoded and hinder the economy. Well, there's perhaps no set of regulations that seems more arbitrary to people in business than the U.S. tariff system.
A: The Customs and Border Protection office at the Los Angeles-Long Beach seaport.
ALEX BLUMBERG: There is no logic to tariffs, no general rule of thumb to calculate how much duty you'll need to pay to bring an item into the United States. The only way to find out is by consulting this very big, foot-wide book that makes a satisfying thump when you drop it on a table.
(SOUNDBITE OF A THUMP)
ELVA MUNETON: This is the Harmonized Tariff Schedule, and in here you will find every commodity that you could possibly think of with a duty rate.
BLUMBERG: Wood tar, rodenticides...
MUNETON: Insecticides.
BLUMBERG: Insecticides.
MUNETON: As you could see, you have tariff numbers and then you have a description of what the merchandise is. And then you have a duty rate, which would tell you, if you are bringing these insecticides, you would be paying, let's say, 2.8 percent.
BLUMBERG: Oh, and the same shoe will get assessed a different duty depending on whether it's for a woman or a man.
MUNETON: Women's is twelve and a half and men get eight and a half percent. So again......
BLUMBERG: Wait. Women get 12 and a half and men got eight and a half.
MUNETON: Mm-hmm. Yes, they do.
BLUMBERG: But also, these seemingly arbitrary distinctions create a huge incentive for importers to try and get around the rules. Which means the men and women who work at our nation's ports, must constantly verify that importers are bringing in what they say they're bringing in. And that verification, it can get ugly.
MARIAN FEDOROV: One of the tools that we like to use is an autopsy saw.
BLUMBERG: This is Marion Fedorov, a scientist at the U.S. Customs and Border Protection testing lab. One of her main jobs: Sawing apart gym shoes and other items of footwear. For example, if a shoe is more than 50 percent leather, it will get a lower duty rate. How do you verify what percentage of the shoe is leather? You need to cut it open and measure all the component parts - which brings us to the autopsy saw.
FEDOROV: It does a really nice job of cutting through the leather textile and rubber-plastic components that we're trying to separate.
BLUMBERG: So you're about to cut this shoe.
FEDEROV: Here you go.
(SOUNDBITE OF SAW)
BLUMBERG: Michael Cone is a trade lawyer.
MICHAEL CONE: You know, there are almost no producers of apparel left in the United States. There's hardly any footwear left. So these are real truly vestiges of an older time when, in fact, we had those jobs. You know, so why are they still here?
BLUMBERG: In the old...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CONEA: Revenue generation and also inertia, for sure. Inertia is a big part of it.
BLUMBERG: I'm Alex Blumberg, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And I'm Robert Siegel. Fifty years ago this week John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol. And on that cold January day, the President Kennedy delivered one of the most famous speeches in American history.
JOHN F: Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.
SIEGEL: And it was that new generation that found inspiration in Kennedy's words, especially in this challenge.
KENNEDY: And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
SIEGEL: Unidentified Announcer: Inauguration day dawns on a capital that has been almost paralyzed by a full-fledged blizzard.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NATHAN ROTT: January 20th, 1961. Bruce Birch was 19 years old. He had moved to Washington from Kansas just in time to see the inauguration. And after a two- mile hike, because his bus got stuck in the eight inches of snow, he made it to the U.S. Capitol.
BRUCE BIRCH: It was literally still snowing and blowing. And I remember music from one of the military bands, thinking, man, I'd worry about my lips freezing to the mouthpiece.
ROTT: Famously, Kennedy wasn't wearing a coat or a hat. Forty-three years old, tan, even to those watching on a black and white TV, he looked the part of the youngest man ever elected to the Oval Office. He stepped to the microphone.
KENNEDY: We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom.
ROTT: He spoke of beginnings and ends, war and peace, disease and Poverty. He built the listeners up and then, finally, let loose the line that shaped a generation
KENNEDY: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
BIRCH: I remember feeling very invigorated by it, feeling at the end of the speech, man, this really makes me want to do something, to contribute.
ROTT: And Bruce Birch did contribute. He became a teacher, a professor and, later, dean of Wesley Theological Seminary. Birch answered Kennedy's call, and so did many others. Nineteen-year-old Donna Shalala was in her residence hall at Western College for Women in Ohio. The room was packed with freshmen but quiet as they watched on a fuzzy TV.
DONNA SHALALA: His exact words hit me like a splash of water. He was actually talking to me and he was speaking about public service.
ROTT: And public service was something Shalala had never really considered. But here was the President asking her to do something. A year later she joined the Peace Corps because...
SHALALA: That was the embodiment of President Kennedy's call to my generation for service.
ROTT: Gonzalo Barrientos heard it, too. He heard it from Texas.
GONZALO: BARRIENTOS: In Bastrop, Texas, where I grew up, there were three schools. There was a school for blacks, a school for whites, a school for Mexicans.
ROTT: Barrientos was the son of farmers, of cotton pickers. Kennedy's speech struck him because...
BARRIENTOS: He spoke for all of us, he spoke to all of us, whether you were poor, rich, whatever color, whatever background as an American. That was especially inspiring to me.
ROTT: Bill Hilliard heard the speech that day. But for him, the inspiration came two years later, on November 22nd, 1963. That morning, around the same time President Kennedy was setting out in a motorcade in Dallas, Hilliard was re- reading a letter he'd received that very morning. Greetings, it read...
BILL HILLIARD: You will report for induction into the U.S. Army at 0530, 5th of December, 1963, at the county building.
ROTT: But Hilliard didn't want to be a soldier. He had a job. He was in school, just in between semesters. There was an anti-war movement, his own moral misgivings. He thought of running to Canada, and then he heard it on the news.
WALTER CRONKITE: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died...
HILLIARD: After Walk Cronkite made his announcement, I went upstairs and I got an old copy of Life magazine, which had a picture of him on it.
ROTT: A picture of JFK. On the back, his ask not quote. Hilliard tore out the page, wrote closed in memoriam on the bottom, and taped it to the business's front door. The next day, he enlisted in the Air Force voluntarily, and two years later...
HILLIARD: First time I was in Vietnam, we were in Denang, and the words came back to me again, about ask not, as I got off the plane.
ROTT: So the first thing you thought when you stepped off the plane in Vietnam was?
HILLIARD: Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.
ROTT: It's here, below the eternal flame, that pieces of his speech are etched in granite, the pieces that inspired Barrientos and Birch, Hilliard and Shalala and many others - teachers and nurses, veterans and volunteers. But half a century has passed. Do those words still resonate? Or will they fade with the generation that carried them? I ask Andrew Collier, a 21-year-old from Tennessee, as he walks away from the memorial. He thinks they'll stick.
ANDREW COLLIER: It still clicks today, thinking about what you can do instead of trying to see what other people can do for you, you know.
ROTT: What about the next generation? Six-year old Kole Hurtgren says he knows the words well. He's here with his family. His dad is a freshman Congressman from Illinois. I ask Kole to recite the words.
KOLE HURTGREN: Do not ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
ROTT: Nathan Rott, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Afghanistan's frigid winter has been made colder by Iran and a bit of unneighborly behavior. For a month now, most fuel trucks bound for Afghanistan through Iran have been stopped at the border. As a result, gasoline and heating fuel prices have spiked. Iran claims it's trying to stop fuel heading for U.S.- led NATO forces, though the U.S. denies that any of it is.
NPR: anti-Iranian protests in Kabul, as well as a rare protest in support of the United States.
QUIL LAWRENCE: It was a fitting symbol for a protest against rising fuel prices. Scores of young Afghans riding bicycles assembled recently outside the Iranian Embassy in downtown Kabul. They carried a banner reading: Life without oil is possible. Life without honor is not.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
LAWRENCE: One man in the crowd shouted out the names of Iran's ambassador to Afghanistan, Iran's president and Iran's supreme leader, to which the throng replied: Death.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
LAWRENCE: It's not just that the price of heating oil and gas is up 50 percent, knock-on effects are driving up the prices of anything that needs to be transported by truck. In Afghanistan, that's just about everything. Lines have been long outside gas stations like this one in Kabul. And station manager, Ghulam Sakhi, says some taxi drivers and truckers are wondering if they can afford to work at all with prices so high.
GHULAM SAKHI: (Speaking foreign language)
LAWRENCE: About half of Afghanistan's domestic fuel comes through Iran, according to the Afghan Commerce Minister, the first government official to publicly criticize Iran's actions.
ANWARUL HAQ AHADY: (Speaking foreign language)
LAWRENCE: We are not satisfied with the negotiations over this issue, said commerce minister Anwarul Haq Ahady. Iran had promised to end the embargo after a recent visit from the Afghan vice president, said Ahady. But the promise was broken, he added, and with no good reason given for the blockade in the first place. On the international level, reasons are easier to see.
HAROUN MIR: In the past, this is not new. Iranians have also used Afghanistan to leverage.
LAWRENCE: Haroun Mir, a political analyst in Kabul, says that Iran is trying to show the U.S. that it has influence over the success of the American project in Afghanistan, as a warning against any U.S. strike on Iran. He also cites domestic reasons inside Iran. The U.S. has led efforts to squeeze Iran's economy with sanctions, and Iran is currently pushing through its own painful economic reforms, cutting the national subsidy on fuel. For Tehran, hoarding fuel may help ease the stress of both. Also, says Mir, Afghanistan's neighbors all want their interests to be considered in any peace negotiations with the Taliban.
MIR: All these countries have a lot of stakes in Afghanistan, and they don't want to be ignored in case of a political settlement. And these are warnings that Iranians are sending to the Afghan government and also to the United States.
LAWRENCE: But Afghan people feel caught between, says Fardeen Hashimy, one of the bicycle-riding protesters.
FARDEEN HASHIMY: (Speaking foreign language)
LAWRENCE: Iran is allied with government elites in Afghanistan, says Hashimy, perhaps referring to some of the former warlords inside the Kabul government who, in the past, were sheltered and armed by Iran. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has also admitted to receiving literal bags full of cash from the Iranian government. Hashimy says that Iran and some in the Afghan government are dismayed at the sight of peaceful protesters like him. But given a choice between Iranian influence and the Americans, says Hashimy, he'll take the U.S.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLES)
LAWRENCE: Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Kabul.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
But as Nick Miroff reports from Havana, it's not clear if they can create jobs fast enough.
NICK MIROFF: DVD pirates were the first to emerge from the shadows of Cuba's underground economy. They've set up homemade display racks all over the city, blasting bootlegged CDs at pedestrians like street vendors in any other Latin American capital.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MIROFF: Elsewhere, Cubans are delivering pizzas or setting up snack bars and restaurants in their homes, even hiring employees. It might not be a recipe for economic growth, but at least it's creating some optimism during an otherwise worrisome time for Cuban workers.
DAYAMI SANCHEZ: (Foreign language spoken)
MIROFF: Twenty-six-year-old Dayami Sanchez sat at a small stand outside her Havana apartment building, knitting a cap. I'm my own boss. I set my own hours, and I manage my own money, she said. The stuffed animals, hot pads and other knickknacks on her table were all handmade, but it had taken her a week to crochet a pair of $5 gloves.
(SOUNDBITE OF WHISTLE)
RENE RAMOS: (Foreign language spoken)
MIROFF: A few blocks away, 70-year-old Rene Ramos was walking up and down the street blowing a whistle to draw attention to his homemade peanut bars. Without a whiff of irony, Ramos described himself as a symbol of the Cuban Revolution, saying he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Cuban military and served overseas in Angola.
RAMOS: (Foreign language spoken)
MIROFF: Ricardo Torres is a Cuban economist.
RICARDO TORRES: It's not the state anymore. It's you, the main actor of your own destiny or fate, right? It takes time to get used to that scenario, right? So, probably, many people will apply for new licenses, but not everybody will succeed.
MIROFF: For NPR News, I'm Nick Miroff in Havana.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Rob Gifford has that story from Shanghai.
ROB GIFFORD: When Barack Obama visited China at the end of 2009, he held a town hall meeting in Shanghai that was the hottest ticket in town. Graduate student Qian Jin succeeded in getting into the event and got to shake the presidential hand.
QIAN JIN: He's like a rock star. Every student wants to shake hands with him, and he's very nice. I think that is the highest moment for me and for many of my friends. They say, yeah, shaking hands with Barack Obama probably is the highest moment.
GIFFORD: But Qian concedes, by and large, on the policy front, Obama hasn't made much difference to either China-U.S. relations or the U.S. economy more generally. Qian reached out for Obama's hand, but he thinks Obama was overhyped, and that Americans are generally too emotional about their leaders.
JIN: In China, they're so pragmatic. They pay more attention to the real policy than a person. In China, they are saying that what people doing is much more important than what he is saying.
GIFFORD: Tong Shijun of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences says that Obama as being the first black president still resonates with many Chinese.
TONG SHIJUN: President Obama is a positive resource for public relations of the United States at the international level.
GIFFORD: Why?
SHIJUN: Because he sent a message that ordinary people can reach his or her ideals. In his words, nothing is impossible, right? Is that his motto? Rob GIFFORD: Yes We Can was the actual phrase. And who'd have thought there'd be a place in downtown Shanghai playing sections of President Obama's inaugural speech on a loop?
BARACK OBAMA: And with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace upon us, we carried forth that great gift of freedom.
GIFFORD: At Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, young Shanghainese are lining up to take pictures of themselves with a startling likeness of the 44th President of the United States.
ZHU JIETING: (Foreign language spoken)
GIFFORD: I think he's great, says visiting 20-something Zhu Jieting, and we shouldn't be too impatient. Things take time, she says.
PAN TAO: (Foreign language spoken)
GIFFORD: Rob Gifford, NPR News, Shanghai.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Jacob Eisenstein, welcome to the program.
JACOB EISENSTEIN: Thanks.
SIEGEL: And first, those New Yorkers who were doing suttin, what does that mean?
EISENSTEIN: You have a standard form, something, which is used throughout the U.S. You have more phoneticized forms that are spelled more how they might be pronounced, like sumthin, S-U-M-T-H-I-N. And then we have a very specific form to New York City, suttin, which is really almost never used outside of sort of the immediate area around New York City.
SIEGEL: What's another pretty good regionalism that you discovered?
EISENSTEIN: Well, one that we were expecting to find because we had some evidence from speech is a word called hella, which, you know, if you spent any time living in Northern California, people tend to associate with the Northern Californian spoken dialect.
SIEGEL: Hella?
EISENSTEIN: On the other hand, we found things that really seem unconnected to speech at all. The example you mentioned at the beginning, koo, which you could start with a C or with a K, it's really impossible to speak that difference, I think.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: You should hope.
EISENSTEIN: So this is something that I think is really unique to, maybe to social media or to written communication.
SIEGEL: Anything in here that truly surprised you about the differences that have developed so quickly on Twitter?
EISENSTEIN: There are other forms that have the same meaning, that are much more regionally distinct, and unfortunately, most of these forms are things that you can't say on the radio, but again, things that would really never find their way into a spoken conversation.
SIEGEL: As you are applying computational research to linguistics, I mean, do you find that something different has happened here, that first email, then texting, then Twitter, with all of its improvised shorthand and creative misspellings, is in fact making written language more like spoken language?
EISENSTEIN: And now, through social media, we're starting to see that in written language, too.
SIEGEL: Well, Jacob Eisenstein, thank you very much for talking with us about regional dialects in Twitter.
EISENSTEIN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Unidentified Group: (Singing) Tweetle-dee-tweetle-dee-tweet. Tweetle- dee-tweetle-dee-tweet. Tweetle-dee-tweetle-dee-tweet. Tweetle-dee- tweetle-dee-tweet. Tweetle-dee-tweetle-dee-tweet. Tweetle-dee-tweetle- dee-tweet. Tweet. Tweet.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ROCKIN' ROBIN")
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As NPR's Ari Shapiro reports, this is one more way in which the Obama White House has been reaching out both to the business community and to the political center.
ARI SHAPIRO: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described the review.
ROBERT GIBBS: This is simply for the relevant agencies to go back and ensure that the regulations that are currently on their books go through a process that measures the costs and the benefits, that ensures, I think, the very commonsense idea that we must protect the health and the safety of the American people without impeding our economic growth.
SHAPIRO: In a statement, Tita Freeman of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said this is a good first step, but doesn't go far enough.
TITA FREEMAN: Congress should reclaim some of the authority it has delegated to the agencies and implement effective checks and balances on agency power.
SHAPIRO: But White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said concerns about the business community or the Republican Party had nothing to do with the White House's decision.
GIBBS: This is something that has been long in the works.
SHAPIRO: Todd McCracken is president and CEO of the National Small Business Association.
TODD MCCRACKEN: We think it's an important principle that the federal government recognize that small companies operate differently, and a regulatory requirement that might make sense for an Exxon needs to be thought about in a different way for an Exxon service station.
SHAPIRO: University of Maryland law professor Rena Steinzor is president of the Center for Progressive Reform, and while she was not at the White House meeting, she's concerned, too.
RENA STEINZOR: Think about all the disasters that we have suffered in the last couple of years: the Deepwater Horizon spill; the Big Branch mine; peanut paste with salmonella; Toyotas that suddenly accelerate; cadmium in children's jewelry. What you see is a massive failure of a regulatory system. A regulatory system that is dysfunctional.
SHAPIRO: She believes that the White House is pandering to big business at the expense of public safety.
STEINZOR: A look-back provision means that these agencies, which are drastically underfunded, will need to stop doing essential work on food safety, greenhouse gases, imports from China, and put all their time into figuring out what regulations are on the books that business doesn't like.
SHAPIRO: Ari Shapiro, NPR News, the White House.
: Earlier today, I spoke with Secretary Geithner at the Treasury Department. Secretary Geithner, welcome to the program.
: Nice to see you.
: President Obama has described China's undervalued currency as a real issue. You've observed recently that the Chinese currency is rising, after inflation, at an annual rate of about 10 percent. Does that mean that you're satisfied, and the Treasury is satisfied, with what the Chinese are doing about the value of the yuan?
: We think they should move faster. We think it'd be good for China and good for us, good for China's trading partners for them to move faster. Because what that does is it gives - makes it easier for China to manage their inflation pressures; makes it easier for China to encourage their companies to produce things that'll help make China stronger in the future. And for any country that trades with China, it removes an unfair competitive advantage.
: But do they see it that way? Do they intend to continue letting the value rise?
: I believe they do. And I think they will - again because fundamentally, it's in their interest to do so.
: Senator Charles Shumer, of New York yesterday, predicted that Congress will pass legislation this year on Beijing's exchange rate policy. And he said: The time for talk is over; we've had enough of China's empty verbiage. Would you welcome congressional involvement in this issue?
: Well, Congress clearly cares a lot about this issue, as they do. And they're reflecting a broad concern across the business community, labor groups, 'cause there's a broad sense of unfairness about China's practice in this area. So again, they're reflecting a broad sense of concerns - understandable they have that concern.
: But does it help you to say to your counterparts, look, I've got the Congress breathing down our neck here about your devaluation?
: I actually think it's helpful for China to understand, this is a big issue for Americans, just like it's a big issue for all of China's trading partners. So in that sense it's helpful, yes.
: How much does this argument over whether the yuan is undervalued - how much does that account for our trade imbalance with China as opposed to other - say, other obstacles to Americans doing business in China?
: You know, we're very, very competitive as a country in things China needs to grow. Our companies are going to be a - play a big part in China's future growth. That's going to mean more jobs in the United States. What we want to do is just to make sure that we see more of that sooner.
: Are the Chinese generally treating American business fairly when they do business there?
: Again, it's important for China to change 'cause, you know, you're not going to be able to encourage your own people to innovate if you don't protect their intellectual property.
: But how might that change - that is, what are you looking for? Are you looking for Chinese statement of policy that they will respect intellectual property rights; new laws, enforcement?
: These things take time. They're not going to happen overnight. But you have to start with a broad commitment of policy, and that needs to be reinforced with concrete measures to make sure that, for example, Chinese state-owned enterprises are paying for the intellectual property that they use.
: When you say these things don't happen overnight - I mean, it sounds like, at least to American ears, fairly self-evident proposition that if somebody made the movie or developed the software or recorded the music, they have rights to that. Are you still at that elementary level with the Chinese?
: No, I think they understand this is important for China, too. And they passed a set of laws that provide greater protection. But those laws are not enforced yet on a level and a scale that would give us the kind of protections we need.
: What do you say to Americans who hear our various complaints about Chinese behavior and policies? They look at China holding a multitrillion- dollar share of our debt and say, we're going to lose these arguments 'cause they're in the driver's seat.
: No, I don't agree with that at all. Again, China needs very much the things that are - that only the U.S. can provide. You know, we're a very large market for their goods and services. They need and want more access to high technology across the board. They want more opportunity to help to buy American companies, to invest in the United States. Those are things very important to China's capacity to grow in the future. And it's helpful to remind people of that.
: In meetings with the Chinese, the tone of them: Are we talking as two friendly nations? Are we two competitive nations? What's the mood in the room when you sit down with your counterparts?
: You know, it's very candid. We're very direct with them with the things that they're doing that concern us.
: Candid and direct usually aren't positive words in these contexts.
: I remember walking around some market in Beijing at that point. And some Chinese guy in the street came up to me and said, are you American? I said, yeah, I'm American. He said, thank goodness you're American. He said, you Americans, you're like us. You're an optimistic country; you're a candid country; you're very direct and you're very confident. We have that in common and it makes for a good, productive, direct exchange on these things.
: Secretary Geithner, thank you very much for talking with us.
: Nice to see you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Michael Biggs is a socialist at Oxford University in England. He's made a study of self-immolation and political protest, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
MICHAEL BIGGS: Thanks.
SIEGEL: And of all the behaviors that might inspire others to do likewise, setting yourself on fire doesn't seem to be one of the more likely ones. How common is a chain reaction of self-immolations?
BIGGS: It is quite common. We've seen examples of this earlier with the Buddhist monks in South Vietnam, who eventually inspired even some Americans to set themselves on fire, including Norman Morrison outside the Pentagon. And there have been several other cases where one person in one country has set himself on fire and others have followed.
SIEGEL: In a list in Wikipedia, I saw India 1990s, an extraordinary run of instances of self-immolation.
BIGGS: Yes, that was the largest wave we've ever seen, with about perhaps over 200 people killing themselves or attempting to kill themselves, to protest against affirmative actions essentially for lower caste students.
SIEGEL: How do you understand the power of self-immolation as an act of protest?
BIGGS: Well, the power is the fact that somebody is willing to die and to kill themselves, and also to die in such a horrific and painful manner. Because of that, it gives a real credible signal that the injustice they're suffering should be taken seriously. I mean, talk is cheap. Anyone can have a protest and put up some placards and say: Things are bad. But if somebody is actually willing to kill themselves, then we take notice. And, of course, it's also - if you have a photograph, it's very spectacular.
SIEGEL: Of course we routinely speak of suicide bombings. But in those cases, the protest, or the act of war, or terrorism - what everyone calls it, is also homicide, it's taking other people's lives. In this case, the self-sacrifice is limited and it's purposefully limited.
BIGGS: Exactly. And then so it generates a wider sympathy. So even if you're not from that culture or that country, in some sense because it's only sacrificing yourself, other people can appreciate that more than suicide terrorism, where you really have to be sympathetic to think that it's justified to perhaps kill some civilians as well as yourself.
SIEGEL: From your research into people who have turned to self-immolation, do you find that they suffer from depression like people who try kill themselves for other reasons, or that they're typically mentally healthy? What's most typical?
BIGGS: No, they tend to be quite different. They're mentally healthy just like perhaps suicide terrorists. I mean, they're people who believe absolutely in this cause. And they're not - there's quite a sharp distinction between people who commit a so ordinary suicide for depression or psychiatric problems, and people who sacrifice themselves for a greater cause.
SIEGEL: I was looking at the dates of some of the famous self-immolations in the United States during the Vietnam War era, and they run through the mid to late 1960s. The Vietnam War went on for several more years. It wasn't a successful form of protest, if the measure of success is ending the policy that you're trying to end.
BIGGS: No, but that's a very high bar to set any kind of protest action, to say that it has to have complete success. In the sense that Norman Morrison, the Quaker who'd set himself on fire outside the Pentagon...
SIEGEL: This was in November 1965.
BIGGS: Yes. I mean, he didn't - lots of Americans even in the anti-war movement distanced themselves from the cause. But his action did have a big impact on people all over the world. And his widow received many letters from people all over the world, touched by his action. And in fact, some people in Vietnam even killed themselves and cited him as an exemplar for them. So it had an international resonance even if it didn't work in the American domestic political system.
SIEGEL: Michael Biggs, thank you very much for talking with us today.
BIGGS: Thanks very much.
SIEGEL: Mr. Biggs is a sociologist at Oxford University. He has studied self- immolation as a form of political protest.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
But as NPR's Jackie Northam reports, it's unlikely there will be any big breakthroughs.
JACKIE NORTHAM: President Hu's visit to Washington will include all the trappings bestowed on the leader of a great and highly regarded nation, including a 21-gun salute and two dinners with President Obama. Charles Freeman, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the Chinese take protocol seriously and that the U.S. is showing respect for China.
CHARLES FREEMAN: It's important to the Chinese and I think, you know, it's important to the White House to try to demonstrate that it really does view the president of China and the Chinese relationship as extremely important to both U.S. and to global strategic interests.
NORTHAM: Nina Hachigian, the China specialist with the Center for American Progress, says this evening's intimate setting can help establish a better personal connection, to help overcome the growing mistrust that has been the hallmark of U.S./China relations in recent years.
NINA HACHIGIAN: The relationship between the two leaders is something that can really overcome that very pervasive dynamic of deep paranoia on both sides of the Pacific and deep distrust of each other's motives and that personal contact and not just for, you know, half an hour on the side of another meeting, is really critical.
NORTHAM: In a speech last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said China's currency was significantly undervalued. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was sent to China to meet with his counterparts. He later said the U.S. had to keep up with China's military buildup. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought up the issue of human rights during a sweeping speech about U.S./China relations in the 21st century.
HILLARY CLINTON: America will continue to speak out and to press China when it censors bloggers and imprisons activists, when religious believers are denied full freedom of worship, when lawyers and legal advocates are sent to prison simply for representing clients who challenge the government's positions.
NORTHAM: The Center for American Progress' Hachigian says despite the many points of contention, there are areas of cooperation between the U.S. and China. She says the U.S. wants a stable relationship with China, which is a growing economic, military and political powerhouse. But Hachigian says a constant point of tension for the U.S. has been China's unwillingness to accept the responsibility that goes along with that, including helping solve global problems.
HACHIGIAN: We're reaching out our hand and asking China to work with us on these global problems. But China hears that and thinks it's another Western trap designed to bleed their resources. It's just another way in which we're trying to keep them down.
NORTHAM: The Center for Strategic and International Studies' Freeman says with luck, the summit will set the tone for better relations, but he doesn't expect much more.
FREEMAN: We have such an extensive and intense engagement on every level with China, government and non-government alike, it's hard to say that one meeting is going to define the relationship. It simply doesn't work that way anymore.
NORTHAM: Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
A remembrance now of a man who was on this program last month, retired investment banker Gordon Murray. He was upbeat, despite his prognosis.
M: It was six months ago that I was told I had six months to live.
SIEGEL: Last month, I spoke with him about a book he wrote, and about living with a terminal illness.
M: I was surprised how meaningful it was helping other people, and that I really got great joy from that. I, in fact, I tell my kids now, if you start to feel sorry for yourself, just do something for someone else.
SIEGEL: And that's what Gordon Murray did. After a successful career on Wall Street, he set out to educate people on Main Street. And in the final year of his life, he and financial adviser Dan Goldie self-published a slim, smart book of investment advice called "The Investment Answer." It makes five points about how ordinary investors can avoid some common pitfalls. Thanks to coverage in the New York Times, Gordon Murray's story got out, and the book got a publisher.
M: You know, we hit a chord with people. There's something about dying banker...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
M: Probably most people think is a good thing.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Gordon Murray maintained that humor, and an impressively positive outlook, until the end.
M: One of the good things about having one of these malignant glioblastomas is that you do get some time to get closure, to plan and to spend so much great time with your family and friends.
SIEGEL: Gordon Murray is survived by his wife and his two sons, and by his book, "The Investment Answer."
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Now your comments about our program, and a correction - a correction that will please thousands of backseat listeners.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Last week, we described the USDA's proposal to make school menus healthier. And we said chocolate milk is out.
BLOCK: Not exactly. Students would still be able to drink flavored milk, including chocolate, as long as it is fat-free.
SIEGEL: Some of you were upset by our interview on Friday's program with Yale law professor Amy Chua. She's author of a memoir called "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." Chua writes about trying to raise her daughters with what she calls Chinese parenting. It is strict, demanding and uncompromising. An A- minus is a bad grade, and music practice can take several hours a day. She told us about teaching her 3-year-old how to play the piano.
P: So we had a little back and forth that she just wouldn't do it, and then she was kicking and screaming and thrashing. And finally, I said, you know what? I am determined to raise an obedient Chinese - in quotes - child. I took her, you know, to the front door and I said - it was a very cold day - and I said, now, if you don't stop screaming and if you don't behave, I am going to put you outside in the cold.
BLOCK: Oliver Ing(ph) of Madison, Wisconsin, was dismayed. He is Chinese- American, and he writes that Chua seems to perpetuate stereotypes of a model Asian upbringing. He says this: I did, in fact, grow up playing the violin but surprise, surprise, my father, who nurtured me, never demanded I practice more than an hour. When I asked, why bother to learn the violin, he replied that when played well, its tone resembles the human voice. Though I cannot play well today, the sentiment he expressed has stuck with me, and given me a deep appreciation for music. I suspect and hope that your listeners find that their Asian friends and acquaintances had upbringings as varied and diverse as those of non-Asian people.
SIEGEL: Finally, to my conversation last week about Westerns with our critic Bob Mondello. Bob recommended Westerns for those who claim not to like them. His five picks were "Shane," "The Searchers," "The Wild Bunch," "Blazing Saddles" and "Unforgiven."
BLOCK: Many of you enjoyed the discussion, including Donald Furrow-Scott(ph) of Moneta, Virginia, who writes this: Even before the piece was halfway through, my wife and I were each listing our favorite Westerns in rapid-fire debate. And by the end of it, we had not even fully covered all the best John Wayne Westerns, not to mention the thundering herd of so many others.
F: By bedtime, we decided we felt sorry for those who didn't truly know Westerns - and for Bob Mondello who, unlike us, had the unenviable task of having to whittle the choices down to only five.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLAZING SADDLES" THEME)
(SOUNDBITE OF WHIP CRACKING)
BLOCK: (Singing) He rode a blazing saddle. He wore a shining star.
SIEGEL: "Blazing Saddles" is on my list. It's on my list of the top five Eastern movies also.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SIEGEL: Tell us what you think about what you hear on the program. You can write to us at NPR.org. Just click on "contact us," at the bottom of the page.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From Tunis, Eleanor Beardsley reports.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: The house belonged to businessman Moez Trabelsi, one of the 10 brothers of the president's wife, Leila Trabelsi.
MOUNIR KHALIFA: The (unintelligible) is in cinders. This is the thieves' house, robbers' house.
BEARDSLEY: Thirty-seven-year-old Ameljour Tela(ph), who started her own company, says doing business in Tunisia was hell.
AMELJOUR TELA: It was terrible and you are scared all the time. What if I cross them one day in my life, what will happen to me? After years of work, years of maybe one day I will meet them in the coffee shop, we are scared of phantoms called Trabelsi and Ben Ali.
BEARDSLEY: Just three days before the final wave of protest that brought Ben Ali down, writer Abd al-Aziz Belhoja(ph) took the risk of distributing documents showing the extent of what he calls the Mafioso activity of the president, his wife and her family.
ABD AL: (Through Translator) It reached unimaginable proportions. These people wanted to take over the country. That's why they took the banks and the media. She appointed the ministers because, after his death, she wanted to keep control of the country.
BEARDSLEY: In its two decades in power, Belhoja estimates that Ben Ali and his extended family stole about $20 billion, twice Tunisia's national budget.
(SOUNDBITE OF A VEHICLE DOOR)
BEARDSLEY: Our last stop is a magnificent balconied villa on a hillside, the home of a simple primary school teacher whose name happens to be Adel Trabelsi.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLATTERING)
BEARDSLEY: My guide, Mounir Khalifa, says no one in their wildest dreams would have imagined such a sudden and ignominious collapse of the Ben Ali/Trabelsi family.
KHALIFA: We suspected that tyrannical power is weak. But to this extent, this kind of weakness is just amazing. I think if there is one lesson to be learned, it's precisely that dictatorships, they're giants with feet of clay.
BEARDSLEY: For NPR News, I'm Eleanor Beardsley in Tunis.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Andrew Ross Sorkin, of The New York Times, first broke the story of the deal. And he says this is a damaging setback for Goldman Sachs.
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: And because of, frankly, our news article breaking the news and all of the media attention that happened thereafter, there became a concern that this private offering had turned quite public. And because of that, there was a concern at Goldman Sachs that eventually, after this SEC inquiry that's ongoing now ends, that potentially they could come back to Facebook and Goldman Sachs and say uh-uh, you can't have done this, even though you did do this, and you're now going to have to go buy back the shares from the people you sold them to.
BLOCK: It is interesting, Andrew, this notion of soliciting clients because Goldman wasn't advertising the shares. I mean, this was public knowledge through media reports, including your own. Goldman's spokesman told the Wall Street Journal, the extent of the media feeding frenzy was a surprise. How problematic was it, and how rare is it for the SEC to step in, or potentially step in, on a deal like this?
ROSS SORKIN: So they actually started sending out email solicitations to their clients before the article actually came out, knowing that it was coming out that evening. And it is, in fact, that particular sequence of events that is one of the things the SEC is looking at.
BLOCK: Yeah, I'm not clear, Andrew, what Goldman would've had to have done differently to avoid the SEC scrutiny that we're talking about.
ROSS SORKIN: They had planned to do this on a very short leash, a very tight timeline. They had really hoped to go out to investors and, within three to four days, raise the money. So I think there was a hope that somehow they'd be able to do this and keep it in private until the deal closed, in which case, once it became public, it wouldn't be a problem.
BLOCK: Andrew, do you basically have a lot of very wealthy, U.S. Goldman clients right now shaking their fists at you and saying, Andrew Ross Sorkin, you just blew a really big deal for me?
ROSS SORKIN: I don't know if anybody thinks it's my fault in particular. You take the words Facebook and Goldman Sachs and put them in the same sentence, it becomes a media sensation unto itself. So I think this was bound to happen one way or the other.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Andrew Ross Sorkin, a reporter and columnist with The New York Times. Andrew, thanks.
ROSS SORKIN: Thanks so much.
CEO: To help us with that question, we're joined now by Michael Useem. He's director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.
MICHAEL USEEM: Thank you. Good to be here.
: And what do you think about that, Professor Useem? Steve Jobs, is he irreplaceable? As we mentioned, he has taken leaves of absence before.
USEEM: Just by way of summary, here's a dreamer and innovator who is also a doer and executor, and so he is a kind of creative and business genius at the same time.
: You said few on Earth could do what he's done. Would it be the mark, though, of a great executive to make sure that there are people behind you who can do what you've done and do it just as well?
USEEM: So, hopefully, Mr. Jobs has been providing a kind of a class, a tutorial to the top people that he's worked with on how to run that company even if he can't be there every day.
: When Steve Jobs took medical leave before, Apple did just fine. Do you think there's any chance that this is really a myth that's been created about Steve Jobs, that he is irreplaceable, that the company is Steve Jobs and can't really be the same company without him?
USEEM: Having said that, this top he's put in place, hopefully, should have kind of built into their DNA at this point an ability to think strategically, to anticipate where the consumer products market is going to be going.
: Michael Useem, thank you very much.
USEEM: Thank you.
: Michael Useem is director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
D: NPR's national political correspondent Mara Liasson reports.
MARA LIASSON: Last year, the Democrats struggled to overcome their own internal divisions on health care, and that public, messy fight hurt the law's image with voters.
HHS S: focusing on popular individual parts of the law. Here's HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on a conference call today, discussing a new administration report.
KATHLEEN SEBELIUS: As many as 129 million Americans, almost half of our population, age 64 and younger could be discriminated against based on their pre-existing health conditions. But thanks to the protections in the Affordable Care Act, by 2014, those citizens will have the freedom and security that comes with having quality, affordable health coverage.
LIASSON: But Sebelius was ready with an example on hand, a real person who had once had her insurance dropped, Dawn Josephson.
DAWN JOSEPHSON: In December of '08, our son was diagnosed with sudden onset strabismus. It's an eye condition, basically affects the muscles in his eyes. We did a lot of different things to try to avoid surgery, but ultimately it came down that he needed to have surgery, and that took place in July of '09.
LIASSON: Pollsters have told Democrats that individual stories like these are a lot more effective than reciting a list of popular provisions, most of which won't go into effect until 2014 anyway. That delay has been a big problem for Democrats, says Drew Altman of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
DREW ALTMAN: Once the major benefits of this law are in place, and tens of millions of people have benefits that they value, they are very hard to take away. It would be the first time. And so there's a race going on between those who oppose the law, who would like to prevent the major and very popular benefits from being put into place, and those who want to see those benefits put into place.
LIASSON: Drew Altman says the ultimate fate of the Obama health care law won't be determined for several years.
ALTMAN: The most important factor there is certainly not a repeal vote in the House or the efforts to slow down implementation, but it's the 2012 election because if the president is re-elected, then the legislation is likely to move forward pretty much as contemplated in the statute, and if he isn't, then all bets are off, and anything could happen with this legislation.
LIASSON: Mara Liasson, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And Jason, what have you learned about the charges filed today?
JASON BEAUBIEN: So he has not yet been arrested. And the state of this is that this investigating judge is investigating. And in the days, possibly weeks, to come we will find out whether Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier is actually going to be arrested on these charges.
SIEGEL: Now Duvalier was questioned by that investigating judge earlier today. I want you to describe how he arrived at the courthouse.
BEAUBIEN: Police - Haitian national police swarmed into the hotel that he was staying in. All morning, judges, prosecutors were going in and out of his room. In the end, it was more than a dozen heavily-armed police in riot gear, went to his room, escorted him out. He was not in handcuffs. He came out with his longtime companion. He waved to the crowd. And then they bustled him into several SUVs with tinted windows and moves through the streets and brought him to the courthouse.
SIEGEL: Now, here is something confusing to those of us hearing this: Duvalier was picked up by the police - you mentioned his passport. He returned to Haiti on a diplomatic passport, and that suggests that he made the trip with the approval of the government. Do you know anything further about his reasons for making this surprise return trip to Haiti?
BEAUBIEN: We have not heard from him directly as to why he's come back. But people close to him have come out and spoken to the press, and they say that he's come back as a private citizen to help with the earthquake recovery, and the he doesn't want to get involved in politics.
SIEGEL: And Jason, just briefly, how would describe the reaction to Duvalier's return to Haiti?
BEAUBIEN: Certainly, there's some people who are hard core Duvalier supporters. They came out very loud, supporting him in the streets. But other people are quite concerned about having a man who was so powerful, who inflicted a reign of terror on this country, back on his home soil.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Jason.
BEAUBIEN: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Jason Beaubien, speaking to us from Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
But as NPR's Wendy Kaufman reports, the numbers don't tell the whole story.
WENDY KAUFMAN: For help, we turn to Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer for the economist.com and other publications.
GLENN FLEISHMAN: This is an iPhone 4. This is made of dozens or hundreds of components in it - some large, some small.
KAUFMAN: Those components are made in the U.S., South Korea, Japan and many other places, but they are assembled into an iPhone in a factory in China.
FLEISHMAN: Just on the back of the main logic board, there's a chip from Samsung. It's got the memory. There's a Cirrus Logic audio codec. There's a Texas Instruments touch-screen controller, which...
KAUFMAN: Mark Doms, the chief economist at the Commerce Department, acknowledges this approach has limitations but says there really isn't any other way to do it.
MARK DOMS: There's just really no practical way to ask companies to break out the value of the goods by country of origin for all the individual components. That just isn't very feasible.
KAUFMAN: So the total wholesale value of the iPhone - for the 3G, it was about $180 - goes on the Chinese import side of the trade ledger. As a result, says Rob Feenstra, an economist at the University of California, Davis, the...
ROB FEENSTRA: U.S. trade deficit with China tends to be exaggerated.
KAUFMAN: In a much-talked-about paper, Chinese economist Yuqing Xing took a stab at the figure.
YUQING XING: If you look at the manufacturing costs, China contribution is $6.50.
KAUFMAN: That $6.50 is the estimated cost of the actual assembly. He says if you use that figure, not the entire wholesale amount, the U.S. trade deficit with China would be about $2 billion less.
XING: Yes, yes. Actually, yeah, that's the bottom line.
KAUFMAN: Some economists dispute his figures, but there's little doubt that the real trade deficit with China is less than the number that shows up in the headlines.
KAUFMAN: Still, Department of Commerce economist Mark Doms says...
DOMS: Even if we think about the iPhone and whatnot, the overall pattern of the increase in trade deficit with China won't be changed by these types of issues.
KAUFMAN: Wendy Kaufman, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE: For months, Comcast officials had been touting the benefits of the merger with an intense lobbying campaign on Capitol Hill and on the airwaves - in TV spots like this one.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV AD)
NBC U: Innovation, competition and better choices for customers everywhere, Comcast and NBC Universal, the future of media and entertainment.
ROSE: Comcast is the nation's largest cable and Internet company, and NBC Universal is a major producer of TV and cable content and movies. That's a lot of power concentrated in one company - too much for FCC Commissioner Michael Copps.
MICHAEL COPPS: It's too big. It's too powerful. It's too lacking in benefits for American consumers, and it continues us down a road of consolidation we've been on for a couple of decades now. And the most threatening part about it is that this is not just traditional media, but it's new media too. It touches just about every aspect of our media environment.
ROSE: Gigi Sohn is the president of Public Knowledge, a public interest group that's generally no friend of Comcast, but Sohn says the conditions attached to the deal seem to have real teeth.
GIGI SOHN: One is the protection for online video providers like Netflix, like Apple TV, that they will have access to NBC programming and other programming in which Comcast has an interest.
ROSE: Sohn is also pleased that Comcast will have to make affordable broadband available to its customers without having to subscribe to a cable package, and that it won't be allowed to thwart rival Internet companies that want to use Comcast pipes to reach consumers. Sohn is also comforted that most of those rules will stay in place for seven years.
SOHN: We think that those are pretty darn good conditions.
ROSE: Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett says that probably means the FCC did a good job.
CRAIG MOFFETT: Well, I think the FCC has actually shown at least a little bit of humility in saying: We really don't know how this is going to play out, and so let's tread at least somewhat lightly here.
ROSE: Moffett says the cable and Internet ecosystem has changed even since the deal was announced in late 2009. At the time, it wasn't clear that Comcast was getting a good deal for NBC, but Moffett says it is now.
MOFFETT: Comcast bought NBC at a time when the price was cheap. They bought it at the bottom of the market. That's the good news. Strategically, I think the question marks that were there then are only more profound now, a year later. Netflix is a bigger competitor. And the regulatory conditions, if anything, take on even more weight because we're a year further on into the evolution of online media.
ROSE: Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Finally, this hour, news about one of the giants of daytime television.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Regis Philbin is retiring.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LIVE! WITH REGIS & KELLY")
REGIS PHILBIN: Unidentified Group: Oh.
BLOCK: Regis Philbin has been co-hosting "LIVE! with Regis & Kelly" and before that "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee" for 28 years. And, sure, he's interviewed celebrities, but he's done much more than that.
SIEGEL: He has milked goats, jumped out of an airplane dressed as Elvis, tirelessly cheered his Fighting Irish of Notre Dame and harassed his executive producer Michael Gelman over and over and over again.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LIVE! WITH REGIS & KELLY")
PHILBIN: You have been sitting on that little stool.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
PHILBIN: The way I see it, about 25 years...
MICHAEL GELMAN: Yeah.
PHILBIN: ...doing nothing.
GELMAN: Right.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
GELMAN: You know, Regis, you really held me back.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: And Regis has dominated more than just the morning. He was the original host for the American version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" which means it was Regis who built that famous suspense with this catchphrase.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?")
PHILBIN: Is that your final answer?
SIEGEL: As for why Regis is leaving Kelly and the show, he simply said this.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LIVE! WITH REGIS & KELLY")
PHILBIN: You know, everything must come to an end for certain people on camera, especially certain old people.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Regis Philbin, age 79, says he will leave some time later this year.
A: A hand up, not a handout.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)
SARGENT SHRIVER: For example, if you volunteered to join the Job Corps, you really had to leave your home, go to a place where you work 10 hours a day. You are on duty, so to speak, 24 hours. It was seven days a week. This was not a soft touch. It was a tough job.
: Frank, first, how important was Sargent Shriver's leadership to the Peace Corps?
FRANK MANKIEWICZ: Oh, I think it was unparalleled. I'd be surprised if there's anyone who served as a Peace Corps volunteer or a staff member either, for that matter, from, let's say, 1961 to 1965, who isn't grieving today and who didn't see Sarg as kind of the embodiment of the idealism that created the Peace Corps.
: He was, of course, a Kennedy in-law. Do you think he would've been nationally prominent, an important figure had he not been married to Eunice Kennedy?
MANKIEWICZ: Well, you know, he was John Kennedy's campaign manager in the Midwest in 1960. And I think he might have done that, anyway. You know, he was very active in Chicago politics. He was president of the school board. I think he might very well become as prominent, maybe in different ways.
: Sargent Shriver became the Democratic Party's candidate for vice president under the most unusual circumstances when Tom Eagleton had to resign from the ticket when it had been reported that he'd been treated for depression with shock therapy many...
MANKIEWICZ: Yeah.
: ...a few years earlier. How did he respond to that invitation to be the vice presidential candidate at such a bleak moment for that matter?
MANKIEWICZ: But he was a man of great patriotism and saw the need for benefit to the U.S. You know, the Peace Corps, we always told the volunteers there were objectives in the Peace Corps. One, of course, is to help the countries to which you're assigned. The second was to bring back to the United States an understanding of what life was like in the ordinary and poor sections of other countries, which, of course, we hadn't had until that time.
: And that was a mission that Sargent Shriver articulated for the Peace Corps?
MANKIEWICZ: He sure did, from beginning to end.
: Well, Frank Mankiewicz, thanks for talking with us about...
MANKIEWICZ: Always a pleasure, Robert.
: Frank Mankiewicz talking about his longtime colleague and friend Sargent Shriver, who died today at the age of 95.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
For many Americans, a motorcycle trip on the open road is a delicious fantasy. For writer Jonathan Bastian, it became a reality. But no road trip on two wheels is complete without a little relevant reading material. So he has these recommendations, as part of our series Three Books where writers recommend three books on one theme.
JONATHAN BASTIAN: So for those of you who've always dreamed of taking a similar adventure, you've got no more excuses, because I've already solved the hardest problem of taking this trip or, for that matter, any trip. It isn't figuring out where you'll go or how you'll get the bike but deciding on what books you'll bring.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: Jonathan Bastian is a literary contributor at Aspen Public Radio. You can catch up on more Three Books recommendations at our website, npr.org.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And as NPR's Brett Neely reports, it's a sign of how much interest there is across the country in learning Chinese.
BRETT NEELY: Unidentified Woman: (Speaking Chinese)
(SOUNDBITE OF CLASS)
CHILDREN: Unidentified Woman: (Speaking Chinese)
CHILDREN: (Speaking Chinese)
MARY SHAFFNER: I think it's a poem and it looks like a kid's poem. They actually know more than I do. I know a little bit of Chinese, enough to be dangerous, but they're actually better than me.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
NEELY: Yu Ying's executive director, Mary Shaffner, showed me around.
SHAFFNER: You know, it's amazing. They've only been in school - these 4- year-olds have only been in school since the beginning of the year and you saw them read all those characters.
NEELY: The kids spend every other school day immersed in Chinese, taught by native speakers. Shaffner, whose daughter is in the first grade here, helped found the school with a group of parents.
SHAFFNER: We all knew Chinese was the language of the future and what an edge to give our children.
NEELY: Frank Lowenstein's daughter is a first-grader.
FRANK LOWENSTEIN: I had a slightly different motivation. With the amount of money we currently owe the Chinese, I figured it couldn't hurt to have a daughter who spoke Chinese when they come around to collect.
NEELY: Joshua Sloan is a freshman at George Washington University who plans to major in business and minor in Chinese. He was inspired by his dad, who works for Costco and travels regularly to China.
JOSHUA SLOAN: He doesn't speak the language and while he does a great job and he's very good at dealing with people, it would give him that much more of an edge if he spoke Chinese.
NEELY: But interest in languages does follow fads, says Jonathan Chaves, a professor of Chinese at George Washington. Up until the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, enrollment in his department had been steadily climbing.
JONATHAN CHAVES: They went right off the cliff after Tiananmen, and stayed down for a long period of time and only started coming back tracking the news about China getting better.
NEELY: If the political or economic climate changes, he says students may again lose interest in Chinese. But meanwhile, Chaves says this generation of students entering college is already much better prepared to learn Chinese than students were 10 years ago. And the students at the Yu Ying School who've been learning Chinese since they were four will be even better prepared.
(SOUNDBITE OF CLASSROOM)
CHILDREN: (Singing in Chinese)
NEELY: Brad Neely, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And NPR's Greg Allen reports that the abandoned groves have become a threat to producers of the state's signature crop.
GREG ALLEN: This time of year, many trees are still heavy with fruit. There are also many groves that aren't doing so well.
PHIL STRAZZULLA: This is a grove in Vero Beach. This is a commercial grove, 140 acres. You could see there's still little pieces of fruit on the trees. But for the most part, this grove is dead.
ALLEN: Strazzulla's concern is not for the abandoned grove but for a healthy and productive grapefruit and tangelo producer just next door.
STRAZZULLA: This is a commercial grove still, but it's starting to decline. You'll start seeing a few missing tree spaces. You'll start seeing trees that are going down. And this is a direct result of the disease pressure from that dead grove just, you know, across the ditch.
ALLEN: Strazzulla pulls his pickup over close to a tree and pulls off a piece of fruit that's nearly as large as a softball.
STRAZZULLA: This is a honeybell orange.
ALLEN: Right.
STRAZZULLA: This is probably one of the best eating, best marketing oranges - highest dollar volume, highest return to a grower. So losing this block for this grower will be painful.
ALLEN: Citrus growers have always had to fight disease. But in recent years here in Florida, it seems that disease is getting the upper hand. Most recently, two - canker and citrus greening - have been very difficult to control, requiring more care and nearly constant spraying for pests.
BLOCK: She's an agriculture extension agent with the University of Florida in Indian River County. Kelly-Begazo says during the housing boom, speculators paid top dollar for citrus groves.
CHRISTINE KELLY: Now, if you bought acreage at that time, speculating that you were going to be able to make some money off of agricultural development or whatever, and then the development boom busted, there's no incentive now. And that acreage is actually costing you money now. So they have abandoned the groves and - but they're not building on them either.
ALLEN: How beautiful.
BOB ADAIR: Yeah. These are flame grapefruit. Got a beautiful color.
ALLEN: Bob Adair is a citrus researcher. We're in the middle of his small grove in Vero Beach, doing some tasting.
ADAIR: Now, this is going to be a little bit acid. Juicy, huh?
ALLEN: Yeah.
ADAIR: You got juice on the microphone.
ALLEN: Adair is working with USDA in the University of Florida, looking for better ways to control the ever-growing list of citrus diseases. At the top currently is greening disease. It's spread by a tiny insect called psyllid. Adair says in his grove, it's infected nearly a third of all his trees. On a tangelo tree, he lifts a branch that's beginning to show the effects.
ADAIR: This is the feeding damage caused by the psyllid. We call those notched leaves. The other symptoms that you see here are these very, very small leaves.
ALLEN: Citrus producers in Indian River have begun a program to bulldoze and burn trees in abandoned groves. But it's costly and depends on the cooperation of sometimes absentee owners. It's the latest of many challenges for an industry that's long grown one of Florida's most lucrative crops. Adair says the last three decades have presented citrus growers with one new disease after another. The reason, he says, is globalization.
ADAIR: What we did was we very efficiently took citrus from another hemisphere, brought it into the United States, into Florida, and grew it as an exotic species. We took it away from its natural enemies. And what we're seeing right now is all the natural enemies of citrus have found it here in Florida.
ALLEN: Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro has this story from Jerusalem.
LOURDES GARCIA: Regularly in the Israeli press, words like fascism and racism are used to describe some of the policies under consideration by the government. Yaron Ezrahi is a left-leaning political scientist from Hebrew University.
P: I was born in Israel over 70 years ago. I don't remember a period where people would feel that speaking openly against the occupation, against racism directed to Israeli Arabs, is a dangerous thing. In Israel, it is a dangerous thing.
GARCIA: Gadi Wolfsfeld is also a professor of political science at Hebrew University. He says many here blame Netanyahu for not doing more to temper rhetoric that could provoke political violence among Israelis.
P: Once again, he has stood on the side as the flames of hatred are rising, and, you know, I think violence is inevitable at this point.
GARCIA: Wolfsfeld says Israelis are polarized, and they aren't sure anymore what Netanyahu stands for. His only real achievement, Wolsfeld says, has been his ability to keep his coalition government intact.
P: When all you do is technical moves - you know, give the Haredim this, give Labor that, give the - when all you are doing is trying to keep alive, in the end it may kill you because you have no vision. You're not - you don't have any momentum.
GARCIA: A recent poll shows that Netanyahu's popularity is at an all-time low. Only 34 percent think he's doing a good job. And so Netanyahu has found himself in the uncomfortable position in recent weeks of having to do damage control. Here he is speaking at a news conference given to the foreign press.
P: The assumption that Israel, that Israel is moving to a bad place, no compare - look, you have to ask where is the government going because we are committed, and I am committed, to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state with its democratic values.
GARCIA: A European Union report released this week recommended harsh measures against settlers and settlements in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu, again speaking at the foreign press news conference, insisted that he is a man who can make peace.
P: No coalition considerations will prevent me from pursuing a peace that I believe in. And I'll tell you something else: I think if I bring a peace agreement, which means that I believe in the agreement that I will sign, I think I will bring the support of the Israeli public. I don't think. I know that.
GARCIA: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Jerusalem.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
NPR's Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports.
BARBARA BRADLEY HAGERTY: In 1996, Catholic bishops in Ireland decided they would begin working with police to help identify pedophile priests. A year later, the Vatican panel wrote back with its assessment of the policy.
SIEGEL: Plaintiffs' attorney Jeffrey Anderson is suing the Vatican, something no one has done successfully before, on behalf of an American molested by a priest. He calls the letter a smoking gun.
BLOCK: This letter is a stunning piece of evidence that the Vatican has control, it demands secrecy, and it failed to protect the kids, as it did our client.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: Anderson is trying to prove that the priest was an employee of the Vatican, and therefore, the Vatican is accountable. He says the 1997 letter and other documents showed the buck stops with the pope.
BLOCK: There is but one entity and one man that is in control of all matters pertaining to sexual abuse and the movement of priests, and that is the Holy See, the pope.
BLOCK: It's not a smoking gun.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: Nick Cafardi is a canon lawyer at Duquesne University Law School. He says the letter to the Irish bishops is bathed in hypotheticals, problems that could arise if the bishops turned over cases to the police.
BLOCK: It doesn't say you can't do this. It says it might be problematical. If I'm an Irish bishop and I get a letter like this, I think, well, okay, that's their opinion.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: However you interpret the Irish letter, it's unclear whether it will help any lawsuit in the United States, says Joe Dellapena, a law professor at Villanova University.
P: If can be shown it applied in the United States, it would, I think, be very damaging.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: But for it to be relevant in U.S. courts, he says, you have to show that the letter was intended to apply to U.S. bishops or that U.S. bishops received a similar warning.
P: If you could show other evidence of Vatican involvement in the United States, then maybe the Irish letter might reinforce an inference, but by itself, it doesn't prove very much about the United States.
BRADLEY HAGERTY: Barbara Bradley Hagerty, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Howard Berkes reports from Beckley, West Virginia.
HOWARD BERKES: The officials at the Mine Safety and Health Administration said these were not firm conclusions. They still have evidence to analyze, and they want a second round of interviews for some witnesses. But everything they've seen leads them to say again what they first said April 5th.
BLOCK: I mean, we still stand by our point that all explosions are preventable.
BERKES: This shearer, as it's called, had multiple maintenance and equipment failures. Some of its carbide-tipped bits were worn down to steel nubbins, which led to more sparks as it hit sandstone in the coal seam. And a water spray system on the device wasn't working.
BLOCK: It's used for dust control, but secondly and most importantly in this case, it's used to quench any frictional ignition that may be occurring.
BERKES: Massey Energy's own mine managers didn't report these malfunctioning systems in a required safety inspection before the blast, noted Assistant Secretary of Labor Joe Main.
BLOCK: The operators have a responsibility to be conducting these examinations to protect the miners. These are things that should have been caught during normal mine operator examinations.
BERKES: These are things that are also supposed to be caught by federal mine safety inspectors, but neither Main nor Stricklin would admit to any failure there. Stricklin says his inspectors wrote hundreds of citations and violations for Upper Big Branch.
BLOCK: In addition, the mining environment changes dramatically in one shift. There's no way that we can say that when we were there last, and the sprays and the bits were in place, that they would have been in place on April the 5th. I think my folks were enforcing the law here.
BERKES: Massey Energy has its own theory about the blast, which casts it as a natural and unpredictable infusion of gas that was so sudden and vast it overwhelmed all safety systems. Stricklin says all the evidence rejects that.
BLOCK: I can't reiterate this enough: We do not think this was a massive methane explosion. We think it was small and then turned into a coal dust explosion.
BERKES: Howard Berkes, NPR News, Beckley, West Virginia.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Reporter Alex Schmidt took the plunge.
ALEX SCHMIDT: The pool is tucked into a dark, back corner of the museum. It's the size of a mini-lap pool and three feet deep, and it's ringed with small blue lights. There's a creepy soundtrack playing and cameras project big images on either side of the pool, featuring lines of cocaine.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SCHMIDT: The piece is called "CC4 Nocagions." It was conceived in 1973 by Brazilian artists Helio Oiticica and Neville D'Almeida. MOCA curator Alma Ruiz says the piece was about freedom during an oppressive Brazilian regime - freedom to experience art differently, even to do drugs. Today, though, she says it has another meaning.
BLOCK: We sometimes get so removed by living virtual lives. And I think it is more relevant today to think about the physicality of the exhibition, the fact that you have to experience the work not just with the eyes but with your ears, with your body, with your skin.
SCHMIDT: Yes, visitors are invited to swim in the pool. The museum even sells $16 disposable bathing suits in case you come unprepared. Keenan Blau had brought his own. He was just getting out of the pool when I arrived.
BLOCK: The colors, like, reflect interesting images onto, like, the surface. So it really, like, intensifies, like, the pool. It's pretty refreshing. I like it.
SCHMIDT: Jonathan Lewis got in soon after me. He thought the awkwardness was the point.
BLOCK: It's weird, the moment you realize you're part of the exhibit. I mean, I was swimming probably for about five minutes, and suddenly I realized that all these people are standing around staring at me in the exhibit. So that's what makes it so incredibly immersive, to actually participate in this exhibit. It's awesome.
SCHMIDT: For NPR News, I'm Alex Schmidt.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on a new study that uses genetics to help explain why some bedbugs just won't die.
JON HAMILTON: The pesticide known as DDT pretty much wiped out bedbugs more than 50 years ago. But they're back. And Susan Jones of Ohio State University in Columbus says the challenge has never been greater.
SUSAN JONES: We're dealing with a different bug than what we were decades ago when bedbugs were a problem in the U.S.
HAMILTON: Jones says the modern bedbug is harder to exterminate. To figure out why, she and other scientists compared the genes of today's bedbugs with those of earlier bugs. Jones says that's possible because, decades ago, a military bug expert started a colony of bedbugs that has lived in complete isolation ever since.
JONES: So it has had absolutely no exposure to insecticides. When you expose it to pesticides, the bugs just keel over.
HAMILTON: Jones says she got her modern bugs from an apartment complex in Columbus.
JONES: They had had a ongoing problem with bedbugs, repeated insecticide treatments, and the bedbugs were not going away.
HAMILTON: Suggesting they had developed resistance. So the researchers compared these new bugs with ones from the old colony. Omprakash Mittapalli from Ohio State University in Wooster says they focused on the genes involved in getting rid of toxins such as insecticides.
OMPRAKASH MITTAPALLI: When an organism encounters a toxin, it basically breaks it down. It basically modifies the compound so that it's easily excretable.
HAMILTON: Mittapalli suspected modern bedbugs had genes that encouraged their bodies to produce more of the enzymes that break down pesticides. And he says that's just what they found.
MITTAPALLI: These enzymes are indeed higher in the pesticide-exposed populations compared to the pesticide-susceptible population.
HAMILTON: Ken Haynes of the University of Kentucky has studied many populations of modern bedbugs exposed to common pesticides known as pyrethroids.
KEN HAYNES: Many of those populations have a level of resistance that's quite extraordinary.
HAMILTON: They can survive 1,000 times the amount of pyrethroid needed to kill a strain without any resistance. Haynes says all this new information suggests it may be time to try a different approach to killing bedbugs.
HAYNES: Instead of relying on the same insecticide generation after generation of the bedbugs, you'd rotate to a different class of pyrethroid or a different class of insecticide altogether with a different mode of action.
HAMILTON: Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
On January 1st, Janssen finished building a replica of Ohio State's famous football stadium, known as the Horseshoe. It is made entirely of LEGOs, a million of them, by his own estimate. And Professor Janssen joins us now. Welcome to the program, and congratulations.
P: Thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: What kind of scale are we talking about? How big is the model of the Horseshoe made out of LEGOs?
P: The model I made is in a scale of one to 120.
SIEGEL: I assume this required a good deal of planning, you didn't just work from a snapshot tacked to the table. What did you do?
P: That's correct. I actually started planning this five years ago, and it took me three years to plan, collect pieces and sort pieces. In these big projects, often the planning stages take quite a long time, and once you figure out how to build it and what pieces you need, then building itself can actually go pretty swiftly.
SIEGEL: A million LEGOs, though. I don't know what the current street value of a LEGO block is, but this sounds like a pretty expensive project that you've undertaken.
P: All in all, it added up, but a lot of these pieces, I've had since I was a kid. I grew up playing with LEGOs. A lot of my friends, I trade bricks I don't need and get bricks I want. So I didn't actually have to buy every single brick.
SIEGEL: Now, let's address a serious problem with LEGOs here. If you put LEGO people into the stands of your model of the Horseshoe, how many can fit into it?
P: I estimate, and it's got to be pretty accurate, about 6,000 of these little LEGO men would fit in the stadium.
SIEGEL: And the real Horseshoe stadium seats how many?
P: Just over 106,000, I believe.
SIEGEL: So even without being scientists, we know that the LEGO people are seriously out of scale.
P: Yes, they are. They are pretty wide for their height.
SIEGEL: Now, I have to say, as a non-LEGO user, I am astonished by how you could achieve the curve of the Horseshoe.
P: The specific curve was not - is not a single piece. It's - I stacked a whole bunch of rectangular bricks, and there's a little bit of play in them. So if you make a large sheet of just rectangular bricks, you can bend it slightly. And since the stadium is pretty big, this bend actually allowed me to make the outside of the stadium, the curves appear completely smooth.
SIEGEL: Was your wife indulgent during this time, or did the LEGO stadium become the other woman down in the basement who was claiming too much of your attention?
P: No, she - my wife is fine with this. And my kids are, as well. It may seem to - when I tell people I spent 1,000 hours on this, that's a lot, but given that the average U.S. person watches TV for 150 hours a month, and I only watch for 50 hours a month, I don't watch much TV, there's 100 hours every month that I had available, and I spent 50 on building the LEGO stadium and 50 on my work and my family.
SIEGEL: Thank you very much for talking with us about your project.
P: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's Paul Janssen, associate professor of physiology and cell biology at Ohio State, talking about the model he has made exclusively with LEGOs of the Ohio State University stadium, the Horseshoe.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As expected, the House of Representatives has voted to repeal the health care law. The vote comes after two days of debate in which Republicans, one by one, took the floor to push for repeal.
SIEGEL: I think it's time we return this House to the people and we can start by repealing the job-killing, socialistic, and out-of-touch health care bill.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Democrats spent the day defending the law. Here's G.K. Butterfield, Democrat of North Carolina.
SIEGEL: Mr. Speaker, I urge my Republican colleagues to stop playing politics with health care. Open your eyes and see the pain of America's working families.
SIEGEL: The repeal effort is headed nowhere, since the Senate is not likely to support it and the president has vowed to veto it. Nonetheless, during the debate, we've been hearing once again the major differences between supporters and opponents of the law, and it can be hard to make sense of it all.
BLOCK: So we've asked you to send us your questions. And here to help us answer some of them now is NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner. Hey, Julie.
JULIE ROVNER: Hey, Melissa.
BLOCK: And let's get started with, by far the most-asked question has to do with the Republican mantra that the health care law is job-killing. And in fact that is the title of the repeal legislation: Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act. A lot of our listeners, Julie, want to know, is the law in fact job-killing?
ROVNER: Now, the CBO also said that there would be a reduction perhaps in low-wage workers because of the law, but they said that that would be small in all likelihood. And that's something that other analysts have agreed with.
BLOCK: Let's move on to a question from Dane Schumacher(ph) of Huntsville, Arkansas. He writes this. He says he's a full-time farmer there. He says he lives off the proceeds from farm sales and he earns less than $15,000 a year. And this is what he wants to know: Will I be required to purchase health insurance? If so, how in the world does the government expect me to afford to do so?
ROVNER: Well, in a word: No. People who earn less than 133 percent of poverty, and that's about $14,400 this year, will get Medicaid coverage which costs them nothing. Now, that's a big change. It used to be that to get Medicaid, you had to not only be poor but fit into a certain category. You had to be a child, or blind, or disabled. Under this new law, you simply will have to be low-income. So starting in 2014, if you are low-income you will be eligible for Medicaid.
BLOCK: But what if, say, he were over that threshold even by just by a little bit, would he have to buy health insurance then?
ROVNER: Also, if the lowest cost insurance policy would require you to pay more than eight percent of your income, you're also exempt from the mandate. So if you don't earn very much money but it's still too much to be on Medicaid, you will not have to buy health insurance under this law.
BLOCK: Julie, we got a question from listener Theresa Stallman West(ph) from Los Angeles. Here it is: A friend of mine works for a law firm in New York City. The owners of the law firm said that when the new health care law takes effect, they will just refuse to provide health insurance for their employees and accept the government's fine for not providing it. They said this will be cheaper than actually providing the required health insurance. And she wants to know, if this is true, wouldn't all companies do this?
ROVNER: The other thing we know is that people have surveyed businesses who say they - most of them plan to continue to offer insurance. It's a way to recruit and retain workers.
BLOCK: In a way, Julie, does this question spool back to the question about is the bill job-killing? Because you do hear about businesses who say if the threshold is 50 workers, I'm not going to hire that - 51st worker. I'm going to keep under that threshold so that I don't face this situation.
ROVNER: Well, that is one concern but also if they decide that it's cheaper to pay the penalty, not provide the health insurance, put the workers in the exchanges, then they could hire more people.
BLOCK: Julie, we have time for one last question and this one is from Dave Manley of Boston. Why does most of the current law not go into effect for several years? If the purpose of the bill is to expand and improve health care in the U.S. and reduce its cost, he wants to know, why the multi-year rollout?
ROVNER: And that's why I think you've been hearing about a lot of these, you know, benefits that are already in effect about keeping kids on their parents' plans until they're 26, or the closing the Medicare drug benefit donut hole; things that are in effect now, because these big benefits are not going to go into effect until 2014.
BLOCK: Thanks to all our listeners for sending in questions. And Julie answers some more of them at NPR's health blog. You can find that at npr.org. Julie Rovner, thanks so much.
ROVNER: You're so welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As NPR's Mara Liasson reports, there was at least one noticeable difference between this visit and the two leaders' previous meetings.
MARA LIASSON: President Obama welcomed Hu to the White House saying the two countries have an enormous stake in each other's futures. But in contrast to the relatively gentle tone he and his secretary of state had adopted in their earlier encounters with Chinese leaders - an approach the administration now feels achieved little result - the president made sure that as he was rolling out the red carpet, he was also prodding China more forcefully on its human rights record.
P: History shows that societies are more harmonious, nations are more successful and the world is more just when the rights and responsibilities of all nations and all people are upheld, including the universal rights of every human being.
LIASSON: Hu, speaking through a translator during the arrival ceremony, pushed back.
P: (through translator) Our cooperation as partners should be based on mutual respect. We live in an increasingly diverse and colorful world. China and United States should respect each other's choice of development paths and each other's core interests.
LIASSON: And that, in a very polite, diplomatic way, means back off. But, later in the press conference with the president, Hu was more conciliatory. When asked to justify China's human rights record, he repeated the basic Chinese line about the principle of non-interference in each other's internal affairs, but also said this, again through a translator.
P: (through translator) China is a developing country with a huge population and also a developing country in a crucial stage of reform. In this context, China still faces many challenges in economic and social development. And a lot still needs to be done in China in terms of human rights. We will continue our efforts to improve the lives of the Chinese people and we'll continue our efforts to promote democracy and the rule of law in our country.
LIASSON: President Obama hit a series of points touting business deals hammered out with China that he said would lead to $45 billion in new export sales and create 235,000 American jobs. But he also said China is not moving fast enough to a market-based currency. And he pointed out other impediments China has erected to foreign products and foreign investment.
P: I did also stress to President Hu that there has to be a level playing field for American companies competing in China, that trade has to be fair. So I welcomed his commitment that American companies will not be discriminated against when they compete for Chinese government procurement contracts. And I appreciate his willingness to take new steps to combat the theft of intellectual property.
LIASSON: Mara Liasson, NPR News, the White House.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
As the two presidents talked, a white privacy screen set up around the White House portico blocked the view across the street. There, hundreds of demonstrators gathered. A handful were there to support President Hu, but the majority from various ethnic and religious groups were there to air their complaints about China's policies.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
U: (unintelligible) human rights.
CROWD: (unintelligible) human rights.
BLOCK: My name is Mustafa Rusi(ph). I'm from East Turkestan but currently, I live in Virginia. We came out here to support our human rights. And kids like these right here, they live in fear because they arrest them, they torture them, they execute them (unintelligible).
CROWD: What do we want? Freedom.
BLOCK: My name is Mindy(ph), last name, G-E, Mindy Ge. Yeah. We come here. I am Falun Gong practitioners to ask for stop the persecution of Falun Gong in China.
BLOCK: My name is Shu(ph), law student at University of Virginia and we are here to welcome our president, Hu Jintao.
CROWD: Bow down, Hu Jintao.
BLOCK: My name is Mark Kao(ph). We are here to protest China's policy against Taiwan and also Tibet and East Turkestan. I think we need a dialogue, you know, U.S. need a dialogue with China. But we need to let Mr. Obama know that the current policy is not acceptable.
U: Free Tibet. Free Tibet.
BLOCK: Sound from demonstrations today outside the White House.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Economic issues were front and center today during talks between President Obama and President Hu. This afternoon, the two met with a handpicked group of high-level American and Chinese business leaders.
NPR: trade, the protection of intellectual property and the dispute over China's currency. John, first on that issue, trade. The White House released a list of exports to China involving American companies. Tell us about that.
JOHN YDSTIE: In fact, the orders for some of these Boeing jets actually go back several years. And they're being showcased, in the words of the White House, at this summit. The point is that the White House is - it's trying to show that U.S. economic relations with China, despite their problems, are beneficial to both countries. U.S. exports to China last year total $100 billion and those exports are growing twice as fast as any other country.
SIEGEL: But as you say, they're showcasing the good news. There are still significant barriers and problems that U.S. companies face when they try to participate in the Chinese market.
YDSTIE: One would ease the requirement that U.S. companies would have to essentially share intellectual property in order to bid on Chinese government contracts. Business leaders told me they're encouraged, but they're anxious to see how the commitment is enforced before they begin celebrating a victory.
SIEGEL: Now, what about the U.S. concern that China is intentionally suppressing the value of its currency to make its exports cheaper?
YDSTIE: Well, interestingly, the U.S. criticism has been dialed back a little there. President Obama still said today, China needs to let its currency rise, but the U.S. is now less worried because an indirect force is helping out - inflation. Rapid inflation in China's domestic economy is raising the costs of labor and other inputs like steel that go into it. That makes Chinese exports more expensive and U.S. products cheaper and more competitive, so it's having the effect that a hike in the value of the Chinese currency would have.
SIEGEL: So the U.S. is expressing satisfaction with the result, if not with the reason for the result.
YDSTIE: Exactly.
SIEGEL: Thank you, John. That's NPR's John Ydstie.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As Craig LeMoult of member station WSHU reports, that may be just what Lieberman wants.
CRAIG LEMOULT: Lieberman addressed a crowd of supporters and press at a Marriot hotel in Stamford. He said his wife Hadassah once asked him how long he was going to stay in the Senate. He said this was his response.
BLOCK: I promise you that when Regis leaves television, I'll leave the Senate, and here we are.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
LEMOULT: Regis Philbin announced his retirement yesterday. Lieberman first became a senator in 1988. He was chosen as Al Gore's running mate in 2000. And since then, his relationship with the Democratic Party has been a little rocky.
BLOCK: I have not always fit comfortably into conventional political boxes. Maybe you've noticed that.
LEMOULT: During his last re-election campaign, Lieberman's support for the Iraq War became a controversial issue, and he was defeated in the Democratic primary. But he went on to win a fourth term running as an Independent. He caused more headaches for the Democrats in 2008 when he chose to support Republican John McCain in the presidential election over Barack Obama. He even spoke at the Republican National Convention.
BLOCK: I'm here to support John McCain because country matters more than party.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHEERING)
LEMOULT: Lieberman became a central figure in keeping a public option out of the health care overhaul law, sparking some protests in his home state, like this one outside his Hartford office.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTEST)
CROWD: Hey, Joe, remember us? The ones you shoved under a bus?
LEMOULT: John Olsen is the president of the Connecticut AFL-CIO. He says Lieberman's announcement is tough for the state, paired with long-time Democratic Senator Chris Dodd's recent retirement.
BLOCK: One could agree or disagree with the senator, but for sure, you know, the Senate that operates with seniority being important, we've lost two senior senators and we've got a lot of work to do to catch up.
LEMOULT: The race to succeed Lieberman is already under way. Yesterday, Connecticut's former secretary of the state, Susan Bysieqwicz, announced her candidacy for the Democratic nomination. And two Democratic congressmen, Chris Murphy and Joe Courtney, have said they're interested. On the Republican side, Linda McMahon, who recently lost a race for Dodd's seat, has said she may run. For Lieberman's part, he's not out of office until January of 2013.
BLOCK: Having made this decision not to run enables me to spend the next two years in the Senate devoting the full measure of my energy and attention to getting things done for Connecticut and our country.
LEMOULT: For NPR News, I'm Craig LeMoult in Stamford, Connecticut.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Senator Lieberman's announcement comes one day after Democratic Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota said he too will be stepping down. And here to talk about the political landscape shaping up for Senate elections in 2012 is Amy Walter. She's a regular guest on this program, and the political director of ABC News. Welcome back, Amy.
BLOCK: Thank you very much, Melissa.
BLOCK: And let's do a little election math here. Democrats now hold a 53 to 47-seat edge in the Senate. They also have a whole lot more seats that they will have to defend in 2012 than the Republicans do.
BLOCK: That's exactly right. In order for Republicans to get control of the Senate, they need to pick up four seats. Or if they win the White House, they need three seats. The good news for Republicans, they only have 10 seats they have to defend. They have 23 seats they can go after that Democrats hold right now, including states that are very red, places like Nebraska and North Dakota and West Virginia. And there are potential for a number of open-seat opportunities for Republicans.
BLOCK: Let's talk a little bit about North Dakota. We did just see a Democratic Senate seat that had been held by Byron Dorgan go to a Republican, John Hoeven. And that state's only House seat flipped from Democrat to Republican. Do you think this will be an easy pick-up for Republicans in 2012, the Kent Conrad seat?
BLOCK: This looks by every mention to be the kind of place where Republicans could pick it up. And it's not just because it's such a red state. It's also because there is not a deep bench of Democrats in the state. There are plenty of Republicans interested in running for what could be a once-in-a-lifetime shot at a Senate seat. And, you know, when you look at just how tough it's going to be in a presidential election as well, I just think this is going to be one of those seats that ultimately Democrats probably are going to have to write off.
BLOCK: Amy, we're already talking about 2012. We just got through the last election, but one key theme there, obviously, was the strength that we saw of the Tea Party and how that ended up shaping some of the contests. Are you expecting to see the same thing in 2012?
BLOCK: So the real question in my mind, for 2012, is not what influence will the Tea Party have, but what kind of influence will it have? And can they consider themselves outsiders anymore, given how influential they will be - much more influential they'll be in Congress, as well as in many of these states?
BLOCK: There was a statement from the National Republican Senatorial Committee after these two retirements were announced saying, all of us are left to wonder how many more Democrats may follow in their footsteps. Amy, you're clearly wondering the same thing.
BLOCK: Hawaii wouldn't be considered a competitive seat if Akaka were running again. As an open seat, very competitive. Same with Wisconsin.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Amy Walter, the political director of ABC News. Amy, thanks very much.
BLOCK: You're very welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
NPR's Chris Arnold has the story.
CHRIS ARNOLD: The bigger of the two problems is probably the Facebook snafu.
BLOCK: Oh, it's a fiasco. It's unbelievable. I was stunned.
ARNOLD: Chris Whalen rates bank stocks for Institutional Risk Analytics. He explains what happened here. Goldman came up with the idea of holding a private stock offering, where they could basically give clients a chance to buy stock in Facebook in advance of a big public stock offering down the road.
BLOCK: Yeah, your classical private equity offering is for an early stage company that's not well-known, that doesn't put out press releases all the time or have movies being made about them, where you can quietly sell shares to institutional investors, qualified investors.
ARNOLD: But Whalen says this type of stock sale is not meant for big-name companies like Facebook. And Goldman, at the last minute, seemed to realize that there was too much public buzz about the deal and that it might run afoul of U.S. securities laws. Those regulations don't allow such stock sales to be publicly promoted or advertised.
BLOCK: They should have known that this was not going to work.
ARNOLD: People on Wall Street say many investors got angry about this. NPR has learned of at least one client who pulled millions of dollars out of Goldman Sachs over it.
BLOCK: You've raised questions in the client's mind as to whether or not you know what the hell you're talking about as a banker.
ARNOLD: Whalen is more understanding about Goldman's disappointing earnings report. Goldman's chief financial officer, David Viniar, held a conference call today. He blamed the drop in earnings on investor worries over the global economic outlook.
BLOCK: These concerns led to greater risk aversion, a deterioration in conviction among institutional investors, and thus a steady decline in client activity.
ARNOLD: Chris Arnold, NPR News.
: Commentator Andrew Wallenstein explains why.
ANDREW WALLENSTEIN: Watching comedy at 10 p.m. might seem a lot like eating pizza for breakfast. There's no reason you can't, but I just don't. But it's a show that relentlessly mocks the TV industry that's about to break the sacred barrier, NBC's "30 Rock."
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM, "30 ROCK")
M: (As Liz Lemon) Where are Tracy and Jenna? We're supposed to be rehearsing.
M: (As Tracy Jordan) Sorry we haven't had time to get into our costumes yet.
WALLENSTEIN: "30 Rock" and "Outsourced" are moving in at 10:00 because the show NBC wanted to put there had production delays, and NBC had more comedies than they knew what to do with.
: 00. Think back to ancient television history, and you'll recall some of the great successes NBC has enjoyed in that hour, like "LA Law" and "Law & Order."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
WALLENSTEIN: The hit medical drama "ER" stayed in that slot for 15 years.
(SOUNDBITE OF TELEVISION PROGRAM, "ER")
U: (As character) Surgery - on its way.
U: (As character) Pulse is weak!
WALLENSTEIN: But now, 10:00 is on life support and not just at NBC. Ratings have cratered, and there's no one reason why. But here's two to consider. Ten is often when people with digital video recorders watch programs they've been saving, and cable channels often put their strongest programs on at 10:00, like MTV's "Jersey Shore."
: 30 just by stopping one show and starting another. Keeping the 10:00 audience around at 11 makes the affiliates happy because more viewers could stick around for the local news.
WALLENSTEIN: There's no reason NBC can't make comedy work after 10. At the end of the day, good TV is good TV, even when it's quite literally at the end of the day.
: Andrew Wallenstein is senior editor for the website Paid Content.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
When he came to NPR, the newborn network was just about to launch its first program, this one.
CLEVE MATHEWS: In addition to our own staff of reporters and editors here in Washington, we will be drawing on specialists and interesting, articulate people across the country to report for us.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: My colleague Susan Stamberg says this about Cleve Mathews: He brought depth and focus to a small, new, ragamuffin team of reporters and producers. He had the highest standards and did much to shape and further the early, now permanent, values of National Public Radio.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
First, NPR's Andrea Seabrook, who followed the vote and the debate that preceded it. She told us earlier that there were some differences in this debate from the original debates over passing the health care law.
ANDREA SEABROOK: So you see these things are moving - the debates are moving forward, but, you know, the biggest difference between 2009, 2010, when we were debating this, is that now the Republicans are in charge of the House. And that changes the game completely, and, of course, it's why were talking about repealing health care at all.
BLOCK: Right. And, Andrea, any difference in tone? Of course, there's been a lot of calls for increased civility in Washington, especially given the Tucson shooting where Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was injured. Do you hear any difference in the tone or the tenor of the debate?
SEABROOK: Let me give you a couple of examples. Listen to this piece of tape from the debate. It's Michele Bachmann, Minnesota Republican, a darling of the Tea Party, talking about the health care law.
SIEGEL: Obamacare, as we know, is the crown jewel of socialism. It is socialized medicine. The American people spoke soundly and clearly at the ballot box in November. And they said to us, Mr. Speaker, in no uncertain terms, repeal this bill.
SEABROOK: You know, at another time, Melissa, you might hear Michele Bachmann say that with much more force.
BLOCK: Hmm.
SEABROOK: And so I think there is a difference in the tenor of the debate. On the other hand...
BLOCK: Or the volume maybe.
SEABROOK: So listen to Richard Neal here, of Massachusetts.
SIEGEL: Obamacare, government takeover, socialism, and the best one of all, death panels. People wonder why the language here is so charged, why it's so incendiary; it's because of the lexicon it has chosen for the purpose of scaring the American people.
SEABROOK: So, I guess, if you were expecting a complete change in debate, you'd be disappointed, but there is some change. There's some difference than there was before, I guess.
BLOCK: Now, Andrea, as we mentioned, the Senate is not likely to even take up this bill. We're going to hear more about that in just a second from your colleague, David Welna. What is the House Republicans' plan B, given that scenario?
SEABROOK: They would like to dismantle this, stop it. They find it to be their mandate to come in here and shut it down with any means they have, including cutting off budgets for every single part of the law.
BLOCK: Andrea, thanks a lot.
SEABROOK: My pleasure.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
As NPR's David Welna reports, it's not just that the measure stands no chance of passing there, where Democrats still hold a slim majority; it's unlikely the Senate will even consider the bill.
DAVID WELNA: It's perhaps emblematic of the one-sided push to repeal the health care law that the Senate has not been in session for one word of the House debate. It's been two weeks since the Senate last assembled, and just as its members left, majority leader Harry Reid had a blunt message for his GOP colleagues.
SIEGEL: The Republicans have to understand that the health care bill is not going to be repealed.
WELNA: Here's New York Senator Charles Schumer three days ago on NBC's "Meet the Press."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "MEET THE PRESS")
SIEGEL: We welcome, in a certain sense, their attempt to repeal it because it gives us a second chance to make a first impression.
WELNA: Senate Democrats got a boost for their cause yesterday from a one-time GOP colleague who's a doctor. The Senate's former Republican majority leader, Bill Frist, praised the package of benefits provided by the health care law.
M: Nobody is going to say take that away. Or if they say take it away, it will be put right back in, because it has many strong elements. And those elements - well, whatever happens - need to be preserved, need to be cuddled, need to be snuggled, need to be promoted and need to be implemented.
WELNA: Here's Maryland's Chris Van Hollen.
SIEGEL: We don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to debate a bill that, thankfully, will go nowhere in the Senate and would certainly be vetoed by the president.
WELNA: Wisconsin Republican and Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan came to his party's defense.
SIEGEL: If that's the logic we take on every bill we bring to the floor, then we ought to just go home. We think it's important to define ourselves with our actions, and that's why we're acting. We think this law should be totally repealed, and that's why we're doing this.
WELNA: And House Majority Leader Eric Cantor today implored Reid, his Senate counterpart, to bring the repeal to the Senate floor.
SIEGEL: The American people deserve a full hearing. They deserve to see this legislation go to the Senate for a full vote.
WELNA: But Rutgers University congressional expert Ross Baker says those votes would not likely be in the GOP's favor.
P: I don't think there would be the votes even among Democrats who are lukewarm about the health insurance reform to support a repeal or anything like a repeal.
WELNA: David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Robert Nelson is a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab.
ROBERT NELSON: They can ask about who I slept with, who I smoked dope with when I was in college, if I did smoke dope, et cetera. They can ask everything about my entire personal life.
TOTENBERG: And pointing to WikiLeaks, he contends that federal rules barring disclosure of the information are no solace.
NELSON: They can't keep it private. It's just not the way it happens in the information age.
TOTENBERG: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
In addition to moves by congressional Republicans to repeal the big health care law, there are challenges to it coming up through the courts. And the lawsuit that many observers think has the strongest chance of success is one brought by 26 states, the National Federation of Independent Business, and two individuals.
SIEGEL: Any luck?
M: Robert, I called both of them last June when I was doing a story on this. And I've tried several times, as recently as yesterday, to reach them. Kaj Ahlburg, who's very valuable and outspoken on every other issue, has failed to return my messages. Mary Brown, I spoke to briefly, including yesterday. She spent nearly 10 minutes telling me that she's too busy to talk to me.
SIEGEL: Well, these are two citizens who say that they cannot be or should not be forced to buy health insurance by the year 2014. I'd like you to tell us a bit about them. First, about Ms. Brown.
M: Mary Brown owns a small auto repair shop in a low-income section of Panama City in the Florida Panhandle. She apparently has no health insurance. She told me she does not provide it for her employees. Her children are grown - she did not say whether she provided it for them, but she says that she needs the - in the lawsuit - needs the resources to run her business and doesn't want to put it into health insurance.
SIEGEL: And Kaj Ahlburg?
M: Kaj Ahlburg is a apparently wealthy, retired Harvard-educated lawyer and a Wall Street investment banker who moved out to Port Angeles several years ago. He says that he doesn't want to have health insurance. He can pay for health care out-of-pocket.
SIEGEL: And what would the big health care law, how would it affect these two people? I'd like to get a sense of what it would do to them and what their complaint is, actually.
M: Kaj Ahlburg is an individual. He's not running any business and he would be obligated to buy health insurance, which he refuses to do or he doesn't want to do because he says he's able to pay for it out-of-pocket and he doesn't want to be required.
SIEGEL: Let's say that the law were to take effect, that this lawsuit were not to prevail, and these individuals refused to buy health insurance. What would happen to them under the health care law?
M: They would face a tax penalty, starting in 2015, of about $700, which would be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service for failure to buy health insurance.
SIEGEL: This particular suit is different from other challenges in that there are these two citizens - the suit originated in Florida - but they are suing as individuals. And in the district court hearing, where it was agreed that they have standing to sue, I gather they had a rather sympathetic judge on the bench.
M: And he equated this requirement to the government requiring people to join a gym or eat broccoli. And most people are expecting that he will rule in favor of the states and strike down the constitutionality of the individual mandate provision.
SIEGEL: Well, Harris Meyer, thank you very much for talking with us.
M: Yeah. Let's do it again, Robert.
SIEGEL: Okay. Mr. Meyer is a journalist and blogger based in Yakima, Washington. He was talking about the challenge springing from the state of Florida against the health care law and the two individuals who are plaintiffs in that action.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
An ongoing referendum in Sudan will likely cut Africa's largest country in two, with the current government retaining control of the northern piece. Already, officials there have announced what they will do with their share - create an Islamic state where fundamentalist law will dominate even more than it does now.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson is in the capital, Khartoum, and she reports that the government's plan has the millions of Christians who live in the North fearing for the future.
(Soundbite of singing)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Two Christian women in this slum outside Khartoum sing that Jesus will protect and guide them as they travel south. For the women and thousands of others here in Jabarona who wait outside with their belongings, the trip can't come fast enough.
(Soundbite of arguments)
NELSON: Arguments erupt over whose belongings are loaded first. Everyone seems to fear being left behind.
Mr. JOSEPH YEL: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: One of those leaving is Joseph Yel. He says that he and other Christians have long felt mistreated by the police. They predict things will only get worse if Islam once again becomes the law of the land. Yel says it's better to go south to an ancestral homeland where many of them haven't lived in decades, than stay here.
Saints Peter and Paul Parish, the second-largest Catholic church in greater Khartoum, has already lost about three-quarters of its parishioners, says Father Musa Timothy Kacho. He adds many have left for good because they fear fundamentalists and state security forces will come after them here.
Father MUSA TIMOTHY KACHO (Priest, Saints Peter and Paul Parish): They may take another step of expelling the priests from the North here.
NELSON: Have you heard this from somebody?
Father KACHO: I heard from somebody.
NELSON: Like in the government?
Father KACHO: Like the government.
NELSON: Khartoum officials vehemently deny they are going after Christians. But they favor the ongoing exodus of southerners, who the officials say can't have it both ways. If they vote to secede, they will lose the right to stay in Northern Sudan. Their departure leaves behind a population the government claims will be 98 percent Muslim.
Christians who remain behind have nothing to fear from a new constitution based on Islamic law, says Ibrahim Ghandour, who is secretary of political relations for the ruling National Congress Party.
Secretary IBRAHIM GHANDOUR (Secretary of Political Relations, National Congress Party): You can see that the church is by the side of the mosque. Christians in the North will do better. Their rights will be ensured. They know very well that Islam in Sudan is a religion of forgiveness.
NELSON: But many Christians don't believe it. The Sudan Council of Churches, which represents 14 denominations here, issued a decree last week calling for a constitution fully guaranteeing all citizens' rights.
Others, like this Arab pastor for the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, says he's thinking about seeking asylum. He fears arrest if NPR uses his real name.
Unidentified Man #1: Now our brothers and sisters from the South are going, we like feel we are losing our shield or our umbrella. So I think the situation is going worse because we don't know what's going to happen, but we can guess that persecution is coming.
NELSON: The pastor is especially in danger because he converted from Islam to Christianity. Some interpretations of Islam view such conversions as punishable by death. What Sudan will do is not yet known. The pastor and several other converts meet NPR to talk about their worries. One is a sociologist.
Unidentified Man #2: (Speaking foreign language)
NELSON: He says even before the referendum, his situation was getting tougher. He recounts how a couple of months ago, a local newspaper outed him and others for converting to Christianity.
The writer asked why Islamic groups weren't going after the converts. The sociologist says afterward, his wife was attacked by a man with a knife in their home. He says he hopes people will pray for Christians who choose to stay in Northern Sudan.
Those who stay may also find refuge at shelters being set up by some churches. Father Kacho of Saints Peter and Paul says he's stockpiling water at a local school should violence break out. But he spends most of his time easing parishioners' fears.
Rev. KACHO: Now, we are trying to prepare people slowly. We are trying to tell them, now you try to be calm as long as the voting is going on and try also to be calm when the result is announced.
NELSON: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Khartoum.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
A surgical team in California today announced they had done something remarkable. They replaced the larynx of a woman who hadn't been able to speak or breathe on her own for more than a decade. The larynx had been severely damaged when, under heavy sedation during a previous hospital stay, the woman pulled out a ventilation tube.
As Sarah Varney of member station KQED reports, this is believed to be only the second larynx transplant in the world.
SARAH VARNEY: This is what Modesto, California, resident Brenda Jensen sounded like just a few months ago.
Ms. BRENDA JENSEN: My kids always look at me in amazement. They think I'm a robot, so they laugh.
VARNEY: And this is what she sounds like today.
Ms. JENSEN: I would just like to thank everyone for all their help and for making me a candidate for this operation.
VARNEY: Jensen spoke at a press conference in Sacramento.
Ms. JENSEN: My 12-year-old granddaughter, Samara, she never heard my voice before because, you know, it was 12 years ago since I spoke, and she only knew me as talking with my mechanical robot voice and she called my machine the talkie-talkie machine.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. JENSEN: Well, now, I don't have it no more, so she don't need to play with the talkie-talkie machine.
VARNEY: During an 18-hour surgery last October at the University of California Davis Medical Center, doctors removed Jensen's voice box, her thyroid gland and her trachea. Then, they put a donated organ - from an anonymous accident victim - back into her throat, reconnecting the intricate nerves and muscles needed to bring Jensen's voice back to life.
Dr. GREGORY FARWELL (Surgeon, University of California, Davis): The neck is an unbelievably complex structure. The blood vessels are small. The nerves are incredibly small, and there's a lot of them.
VARNEY: That's UC Davis surgeon Gregory Farwell, who led the operation. He says much of the surgery was done looking through a high-powered microscope.
Dr. FARWELL: In Brenda's case, we put together five different nerves. These nerves on average are 1 to 2 millimeters, and the suture used to put them together is smaller than a human hair.
VARNEY: Larynx transplants almost never occur, say physicians, because they're rarely a lifesaving procedure, and doctors are reluctant to put a patient on powerful drugs that are needed to prevent the body from rejecting a transplanted organ.
But Jensen was the ideal candidate. She was already taking the drugs after a kidney and pancreas transplant five years ago.
An international team of surgeons came together for the operation. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini from Stockholm was in charge of removing the donated organ from the accident victim.
He says he practiced on animals every day for years to prepare for the surgery.
Dr. PAOLO MACCHIARINI (Chairman, Hospital Clinic de Barcelona, University of Barcelona): Brenda was the first human being where I did it, and I was very, very much afraid when we just released the clamping off the artery that we saw these beautiful organs just flushing full blood and working properly.
VARNEY: Jensen is still breathing and eating through a tube, but she does swallowing exercises every day and is beginning to feel sensation back in her throat. But perhaps the most delightful discovery, she says, is that she can smell for the first time in years because air can finally pass through her nose.
Ms. JENSEN: Well, I've been smelling food like crazy. I go to the store to buy cleaning supplies and everywhere you go you smell food. The bakery, God, that kills me.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. JENSEN: But it's just been a really, really unbelievable experience, smelling freshly cut grass and the air, breathing the different smells that go through the air, taking your garbage out, that's a real good smell.
(Soundbite of laughter)
VARNEY: Depending on how Jensen's recovery goes, doctors hope to eventually remove her breathing tube.
For NPR News, I'm Sarah Varney in Sacramento.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The animal world has a vast vocabulary.
(Soundbite of chickens snorting)
BLOCK: These are male prairie chickens, common in the Midwest. They're strutting their stuff and snorting through enlarged air sacs.
(Soundbite of hammer-headed bats singing)
BLOCK: And these are male hammer-headed bats in Africa. They hang from trees along riverbanks and sing for attention. A lot of the signaling is about sex, as in, hey, I'm here and I'm available.
Well, scientists in Spain have discovered a very different kind of signaling. It's by birds called black kites.
As NPR's Christopher Joyce reports, they decorate their nests with plastic apparently to scare other birds off.
CHRISTOPHER JOYCE: It's not just any kind of plastic, it's only white plastic, bits and pieces the birds scavenge and lay inside their nests alongside their eggs.
(Soundbite of black kites chirping)
Biologists wondered for years why these big predatory birds do this. So a research team set up in a national park in Spain. They recorded and videotaped kites in 127 nests for five years. And slowly this decorating habit started to make sense. It was a signal by the strongest birds that they were tough and could protect their nests.
Now, a lot of animals do things to show either toughness or sexual allure. They'll dance or bellow or display some overgrown body part. But Fabrizio Sergio of the Spanish Council for Research says this is a pose of a different color.
Mr. FABRIZIO SERGIO (Spanish Council for Research): The most funny thing is probably that it's done in this case and not through some parts of the body such as the plumage or a very pretty song, but it's made through some objects, which are collected and constructed within the nest.
JOYCE: Sergio and his team think it's a construction that signals bravado - think Harleys and tattoos. But the bravado is real because only the stronger, tougher nesting pairs decorate this way. The weaker birds, the youngest and the oldest, do not. In fact, they actually rejected the plastic when scientists added it to their nests.
Mr. SERGIO: Some of the individuals actually did not want it at all, they immediately removed it, and this was very extraordinary.
JOYCE: One reason could be that when the kites add plastic, their nest immediately draws attention and attacks by other birds looking for food or a new nest. The tougher birds fight them off, and after that, they're pretty much left alone. Steve Nowicki is an evolutionary biologist at Duke University.
Mr. STEVE NOWICKI (Evolutionary Biologist, Duke University): You know, a male who is in his prime is going to put more decorations on because he can back up his signal, it's not a bluff.
JOYCE: But weaker birds don't have the wherewithal to fight a lot.
Mr. NOWICKI: The young males or the older, more senescent males do it less because they're just less able to be successful if there is an aggressive contest that follows.
JOYCE: And apparently they know it. That's why the weaker birds threw out that plastic when the Spanish scientists added it to their nests. The birds realized it was false advertising that could lead to trouble. Nowicki says that's no mean feat.
Mr. NOWICKI: That requires some capacity to self-assess, realize that the signal that you find on your nest is off and then adjust it.
JOYCE: Nowicki says this signaling behavior works because the attacks keep weaker birds from bluffing. It means in scientific terms that the white plastic signal, I'm tough, is honest.
But wait a minute. Is it really wise to advertise where your eggs are? One bird biologist, Gerry Borgia at the University of Maryland, says he doesn't buy the toughness-signal idea.
Mr. GERRY BORGIA (University of Maryland): To make a nest more obvious seems extremely strange.
JOYCE: He thinks the kites may be doing something quite different with the plastic.
Mr. BORGIA: Camouflaging eggs.
JOYCE: Eggs are white. The kites choose only white plastic. Maybe an array of white plastic in a nest is simply there to confuse predators that eat eggs.
The kite study was published in the journal Science, and it may take more studies to confirm what's going on here. But for biologists, this is more than just bird weirdness. It's a clue to how evolution winnows out winners from losers.
Christopher Joyce, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
One of the greatest rivalries in sports - and the oldest in the National Football League - will be renewed this Sunday at Chicago's Soldier Field. The hometown Bears host the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship game.
The two charter franchises in the NFL have played each other 181 times since 1921.
But as NPR's David Schaper reports from Chicago, the last time the two faced each other in a game this big, Franklin Roosevelt was president.
DAVID SCHAFER: I'm standing outside of Chicago's Wrigley Field. Since 1914, of course, it's been the home of baseball's Chicago Cubs, but for decades, it was the home field of the Chicago Bears too.
And in the 90 years, the Bears and Packers have been playing and pummeling each other in some of the most hard-fought football games ever played. They've only met once before in the playoffs, and that game was played right here almost 70 years ago - December 14, 1941.
Ninety-five-year-old Elmer Possin remembers that game.
Mr. ELMER POSSIN: The Packers won the championship in '39 and in '41. They both had good teams. That's right.
SCHAFER: Sitting in his apartment in Madison, Wisconsin, this week, Possin says he's been a Packer fan since his family bought its first radio in 1927, and he's now been a season ticket holder for 60 years.
The Bears and the Packers entered that 1941 Western Division playoff game with identical 10-1 records. Their only loss is to each other. Possin remembers listening the week before when football games across the country were interrupted with stunning news.
(Soundbite of archived broadcast)
Unidentified Man #1: ...to the 25, and now he's hit and hit hard about the 27-yard line. Bruiser Kinard made the tackle...
Unidentified Man #2: We interrupt this broadcast to bring you this important bulletin from the United Press. Flash. Washington. The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Mr. POSSIN: And the following Sunday following Pearl Harbor, nobody really cared about the game because of the magnitude of the incident.
SCHAFER: Elmer Possin says over the 180-plus games between the two teams, fans have certainly developed animosity, though he stopped short of calling it hate.
Mr. POSSIN: Not in that way. We may say we hate them, but we don't mean it in that light. We respect them. It's a respectful hate.
Mr. DOUG BUFFONE: See, I can't say - I can't use the word hate.
SCHAFER: Doug Buffone played linebacker for the Bears in the 1960s and '70s, and in his 14 seasons played in more Bears-Packers games than any other Bear.
Mr. BUFFONE: Everybody said, well, Doug, you must've hated the Packers. I didn't hate the Packers. I mean, I love playing against the Packers. It was like whoever is left standing won the damn game.
SCHAPER: After the season, Buffone says he and his teammates were all good friends with Packer players. But during the season, Buffone says the intensity of their games was unmatched.
Mr. BUFFONE: We didn't take any prisoners. On field, it was it. It was, you know, do or die.
SCHAPER: Buffone says the two teams' respect for one another comes from their shared history as two of the founding teams of the NFL and the relationship between the Bears' founder, owner and coach George Halas and the Packers' Curly Lambeau.
Papa Bear Halas is credited with helping save the Packers in the 1950s by traveling to Green Bay and playing up the rivalry to drum up taxpayer support for a new stadium. And in 1958, when Green Bay was searching for a new coach, it was Halas who recommended the now legendary Vince Lombardi. Now, the two teams will square off Sunday for the NFC Championship Halas Trophy, with the winner advancing to the Super Bowl for the chance to win the Lombardi Trophy. And fans on both sides of the Illinois-Wisconsin border are stoked.
Mr. VLADIMIR ZINTCHENKO: It's probably the most important game in the last many years.
SCHAPER: At Murphy's Bleacher Bar across the street from historic Wrigley Field, 24-year-old Chicagoan Vladimir Zintchenko is too young to remember any Bears game this big in Chicago and he says neither can his father.
Mr. ZINTCHENKO: They both got the blue-collar, you know, winter background going on. Both play good in the snow. Both got the gritty, you know, gritty fan base rooting for them, die-hard fan base, and that's what makes it just such a nice matchup.
SCHAPER: Zintchenko will be cheering for a Bears victory Sunday right here at this bar where the sign outside, in a tribute to that last Bears-Packers playoff victory almost 70 years ago reads: Party like it's 1941.
David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
For years, the agency charged with enforcing the nation's gun laws has been languishing. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been without a permanent leader since the middle of the Bush administration.
And its budget has lagged behind that of other law enforcement agencies, as NPR's Brian Naylor reports.
BRIAN NAYLOR: ATF, as it's commonly known, has long been part of the nation's law enforcement. In the 1930s, Eliot Ness, who became part of American folklore in his prosecution of mobster Al Capone, was an agent for what became ATF.
(Soundbite of film)
Unidentified Man #1: Where is he?
Unidentified Man #2: They're getting paid to spill beer, Mr. Ness, not to interrupt private parties.
(Soundbite of laughter)
(Soundbite of gavel)
Unidentified Man #1: Answer the question, punk.
Unidentified Man #2: I told you, he ain't here.
NAYLOR: But lately the bureau has had a less glamorous profile, while the FBI, DEA and other government law enforcement agencies have grown, ATF has been stagnant.
James Kavanaugh recently retired after 33 years as an ATF agent.
Mr. JAMES KAVANAUGH (Retired ATF Agent): In 1972, there's 2,500 agents. 39 years later, there's 2,500 agents. No growth at all in 39 years.
NAYLOR: The ATF has been a political target for opponents of gun regulations for years. In Congress, pro-gun lawmakers have kept its budget virtually flat. And there's the leadership question. The ATF has not had a permanent director since 2006. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chairman of mayors against illegal guns, says that has to change.
Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG (New York City): We simply can't afford to have the ATF at less than full strength when so many gun murders are occurring every single day in all 50 states.
NAYLOR: President Bush's nominee to head the bureau was blocked by three Republican senators. President Obama didn't nominate a director until last November. His choice, Andrew Traver, a career ATF agent who's now in charge of the bureau Chicago office.
Early indications are it's going to be an uphill climb for Traver. The nation's biggest gun lobby, the NRA, calls Traver, quote, "deeply aligned with gun control advocates and anti-gun activities." We asked the NRA for an interview but they didn't respond to repeated requests. But speaking on an NRA sponsored radio program, the group's executive director, Chris Cox, made clear his opposition.
Mr. CHRIS COX (Executive Director, NRA): He's bad news when it comes to the Second Amendment. But, again, when you're looking at a president who put up Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan and surrounds himself with this other gaggle of anti-gun activists - and that's what this guy's been, an activist - it's really just par for the course.
NAYLOR: The NRA's objections to Traver, seem to be based at least, in part, on his appearance on a news story on Chicago's NBC affiliate about gang violence. In the clip he was shown dramatically firing an automatic weapon.
Mr. ANDREW TRAVER (ATF Agent): They see these things in movies, they see them on television, video games, it's, like, oh, let's get one of those. It gives them a lot of street cred. Pull the trigger and you can mow people down.
NAYLOR: The NRA says the story was misleading because automatic weapons are not commonly found on gang members.
The Senate has yet to hold a hearing on Traver. A judiciary committee aide says the panel's waiting for the administration to submit the necessary paperwork. Former ATF agent James Kavanaugh says the lack of a Senate-confirmed director with the backing of the president is disconcerting.
Mr. KAVANAUGH: The agency goes on because law enforcement people are can-do people and they're mission people. But, nevertheless, there's not an agency in the government that has to face that kind of a problem. Can you imagine a big city police force not having a chief for four and a half years?
NAYLOR: And while that might suit the gun lobby, gun control advocates hope the shootings in Tucson will spur the administration to push for Traver's confirmation.
Brian Naylor, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The other big football game this weekend is the AFC Championship between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Jets.
In his second year as Jets head coach, Rex Ryan has taken his team from laughingstock to giant killer. They dispatched both the vaunted Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots to make it to this weekend's big game. A lot of football fans don't like Ryan's brash approach, but NPR's Mike Pesca reports that Ryan's players seem to love it.
MIKE PESCA: It wasn't when he burned the ships or buried the football or blamed himself - and we'd get to all of those in our examination of the dour Rex.
For defensive lineman Trevor Pryce, the quintessential Rex Ryan moment was what he did without fanfare for perhaps the least heralded member of his team. It's why Pryce, a 14-year veteran jumped at the opportunity to be a Jet.
Mr. TREVOR PRYCE (Defensive Lineman, New York Jets): His character is what pulls us towards him. It's different from what I have seen - from a head coach, at least.
PESCA: Pryce remembers the Jets' December game against the Patriots, the team's worst loss of the year, by the way. But what stood out to Pryce was Coach Ryan's treatment of Shawn Crable, a member of the Jets' practice squad. These players are routinely treated no better than cannon fodder throughout the NFL, but Coach Ryan so appreciated Crable's anonymous work that he rewarded him by naming a de facto captain against Crable's old team. The gesture solidified in Crable's mind that this was a coach who cared about people, not puzzle pieces.
Mr. SHAWN CRABLE (New York Jets): Once he starts thinking about his players, starts thinking about what people will want and what people will do, you know, he makes a lot of good decisions for his players. And his players respond to him and they play for him.
PESCA: Jets players routinely say that Ryan gets that football is an emotional game. This adjective, emotional, is often read as simply a synonym for fired up. But safety Jim Leonhard says that with Ryan, it's much more than that.
Mr. JIM LEONHARD (Safety, New York Jets): The majority of stuff that Rex says is extremely positive, and he has a lot of confidence in the people around him, his team, his management, you know? He thinks that they're the best, you know? And he says it.
PESCA: Opponents, traditionalists, the more low-keyed members of the NFL club didn't necessarily like Ryan's brash prediction that the Jets would win the Super Bowl. They regard the rotund and perpetually grinning Ryan as uncouth and especially object to his turn on an HBO series as undignified.
Mr. REX RYAN (Head Coach, New York Jets): I believe our team's better than every (bleep) team in the league. I believe our players are better than any players in the league, right? Those are true statements. I -that's how I believe. We ain't going to win, guys, if it's about me. I'm sitting back waiting for us to understand the team that we said we were going to be. What the hell are we waiting on?
PESCA: But players love it. They loved it when they lost that big December game to the Patriots that Ryan literally buried a football at the Jets practice facility.
They love that he took whatever pressure there was before last week's Patriots rematch and put it all on his shoulders, saying that their past loss was only because he was a lesser coach than the Patriots' Bill Belichick. They love the speech he gave at midseason when he talked about conquistador Hernan Cortes' decision to burn his boats upon arriving in the New World. Burn the boats, the team repeated for weeks.
But Ryan's girth and mirth sometimes obscure his worth. A trip to the Super Bowl might burnish Ryan's reputation as a strategist. Of course, the media onslaught that goes with a Super Bowl appearance wouldn't diminish his reputation as a character.
Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
For years now, cities and states from Toronto to Florida have tried to lure the movie business away from Hollywood. In 2008, Michigan got into the game. Since then, it's seen a dramatic increase in Hollywood productions, including 40 films just last year. But now, looming budget deficits have leaders in Michigan and elsewhere wondering if a Hollywood blockbuster is worth the money.
NPR's Sonari Glinton reports.
SONARI GLINTON: The executive of Wayne County has become a big, big movie fan. Detroit is in Wayne County. The movie that ignited Robert Ficano's passion?
Mr. ROBERT FICANO (Executive, Wayne County): The one with Clint Eastwood,�"Gran Torino."
(Soundbite of film, "Gran Torino")
Mr. CLINT EASTWOOD (Actor): (As Walt Kowalski): Get off my lawn.
GLINTON: Well, it's certainly not "Dirty Harry." But it was one of the first films that took advantage of the tax credits the state of Michigan began offering moviemakers in 2008. There have been about 129 movies since then.
The film incentives have also brought TV. There's HBO's "Hung" and the critically acclaimed television cop series "Detroit 187." It stars Michael Imperioli of�"The Sopranos."
(Soundbite of TV show, "Detroit 187")
Mr. MICHAEL IMPERIOLI (Actor): (As Detective Louis Fitch) Got them all fooled, don't you? Rolling into your charity functions, dolled up in your tux like a dignitary, like a refined gentleman. But this is who you really are, Henry.
GLINTON: Wayne County's Robert Ficano says a show like "Detroit 187" probably wouldn't have come if it weren't for the state's film tax program. And Detroit needs every job it can get.
Mr. FICANO: But when the productions come in, there are a number of small businesses that really benefit. The caterers, like, engineers, props. It's probably thousands of jobs and it's grown every year.
GLINTON: Ficano says Michigan has given about $100 million in incentives to movie and TV companies. In exchange, they spent $648 million in the state. And then there are the fringe benefits.
Mr. FICANO: Not only has an economic impact, it also has an image impact.
Mr. MICHAEL LAFAIVE (Mackinac Center for Public Policy): How many people are going to visit Flint because Will Ferrell made his�"Semi-Pro"�there?
GLINTON: That's Michael LaFaive. He's with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
Mr. LAFAIVE: What politicians and others are doing is buying good PR, but that's more symbolism than substance.
GLINTON: LaFaive has been an advocate of rolling back Michigan's tax incentives since they were put in place. He says the fact that the state needs to give tax credits to one industry means the overall system is unfair. LaFaive says business in general needs help in Michigan, not just the movie business.
Mr. LAFAIVE: We would argue that those other businesses would create just as many, if not more, jobs in the film industry if the state would also get out their way.
GLINTON: Last night, Michigan's new Republican governor, Rick Snyder, agreed. He proposed a new six percent flat corporate income tax.
Regardless of what happens, the world can look forward to the movie, "A Very Harold and Kumar Christmas" filmed in Detroit.
Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Detroit.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And we remember another writer today. Wilfrid Sheed has died. The author of a wide range of books, both novels and nonfiction, was born in London, into a literary family. His parents founded a prominent Catholic publishing house and raised Sheed in the United States. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, first met him when Sheed was living in Spain, and he has this remembrance.
ALAN CHEUSE: A slender, vigorous pale-faced talker, cigar-smoker, drinker, Bill Sheed was one of the first serious working writers I'd ever met and the first Catholic intellectual.
This was in Spain, on the Costa Del Sol, in the winter and spring of 1962, in the little fishing village of Fuengirola, where I took up residence in a drafty stucco apartment on the beach because I wanted to be a writer. And, here's the logic, here were the bullfights old Hemingway had celebrated and the cafes for good talk.
Bill Sheed stood tall, in metal braces, the legacy of his adolescent bout with polio, at the center of an impromptu bunch of writers and artists living in this dusty village.
He was for all of his early British upbringing and his devotion to his faith, absolutely without pretension, speaking with the same straightforward wit and humor and kindness that he deployed when he went drinking with me and my working-class American pals as he did with the visiting Sir Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books.
Bill had just begun a decade of fiction-making that produced a series of wonderfully comic novels. "A Middle Class Education," the first of these, had just come out, and I devoured it, feeling the pain, enjoying the laughter at almost every page.
At darts or at the beach or at the village cafe, Bill, with his wit and knowledge, always made us laugh. And now and then, he dispensed pungent advice to a young writer. Stamina, he'd say, that's what you need, something he had learned his from his early wrestling match with polio. Sit down and start writing. At the beginning, there'll be a dozen of your contemporaries to the left of you, a dozen to the right. Don't look up for about 10 years, and when you do, you'll see that most of them will have stopped.
Now, all these years later, Bill has stopped, sad to think of it. But in my mind's eye I can still see him tossing down his last Spanish brandy of the afternoon and leaving us behind in the cafe as he made his clanky braces-bound way up the steps to the church door. He would pause, turn back to look at us, wave and then flick his ubiquitous cigar into the oncoming darkness as he walked through the high portico to commune, as he often talked about it, with his maker.
SIEGEL: Wilfrid Sheed died at the age of 80. Alan Cheuse teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Just days before a planned inauguration, President Hamid Karzai has put off seating Afghanistan's new parliament for at least another month. A legal battle has raged ever since the ballots were cast in September. Now, Afghans are torn between moving on, despite a flawed election, or letting the dispute continue and try to correct the results.
NPR's Quil Lawrence has the story.
QUIL LAWRENCE: The freshman class of Afghanistan's 2010 parliament had already waited four months, with varying degrees of patience, when a sort of orientation was scheduled this week. Three days of training in parliamentary procedure at Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel made a festive scene for the MPs, but then the party ended abruptly.
(Soundbite of conversations)
LAWRENCE: More than 200 MPs-elect heard the news that the supreme court had asked President Hamid Karzai to put off the inauguration of parliament for another month. They reacted with anger and disbelief.
Mr. AHMAD BEHAZAD (Re-Elected Member, Parliament): (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: This is a coup d'etat, said Ahmad Behazad, a re-elected MP from western Herat Province. Any delay is unconstitutional, he said. But that's where opinions diverge.
Afghanistan's two electoral bodies are supposed to be the sole arbiters of election complaints. Despite widespread allegations of fraud, the electoral committees had ratified the results as good enough, along with a nod from the U.N. and the United States.
But President Karzai asked the supreme court to set up a special tribunal for election complaints. Critics say that's because the results, as is, don't favor Karzai's parliamentary allies or his fellow ethnic Pashtuns, who in many districts were unable to vote because of Taliban threats. To many of those candidates, the delay seemed like justice.
Justice SEDAQALLUH HAQIQ (Supreme Court): (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: When Sedaqalluh Haqiq, the chairman of the supreme court, ruled that Karzai should delay seating the parliament, a group of losing candidates in the audience couldn't restrain themselves.
(Soundbite of applause)
LAWRENCE: Karzai's actions have raised the hopes of candidates like Daoud Sultanzoi. In his native Ghazni Province, Pashtuns have a clear majority, but most of their districts had their polling stations closed because of Taliban threats. All 11 seats in Ghazni went to non-Pashtun minorities. If the results aren't corrected, it will drive Pashtuns into the arms of the insurgency, says Sultanzoi.
Mr. DAOUD SULTANZOI (Candidate, Afghan Parliament): The legitimacy issue is a very important factor in a country like Afghanistan that is at war.
LAWRENCE: The Supreme Court did mention the possibility of re-running the election completely, which would be fine with candidates like Sultanzoi. It would not be okay with the international community, which spent tens of millions of dollars to hold the election and then endorsed the results.
But Sultanzoi rejects the international pressure.
Mr. SULTANZOI: Is that better to fix things and then hold elections, or just hold elections because it satisfies Washington's political calendar?
LAWRENCE: As the stalemate continues, the parliament building is empty. The outgoing MPs have been turned away from the building by police and the new ones have not yet been invited in. But the new MPs say that won't be the case for long.
(Soundbite of conversations)
Ms. FAWZAI KOFI (Re-Elected Member, Afghan Parliament): (Foreign language spoken)
LAWRENCE: Fawzai Kofi, another re-elected MP from Badakhshan Province, says that 200 of the MPs-elect are going to go to the parliament on Sunday, with or without the president's approval.
Quil Lawrence, NPR News, Kabul.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
It was not a good day for organized crime. Federal authorities say they've pulled off one of the largest mob roundups ever. 127 people were indicted, more than a hundred of them taken out of their homes early this morning by police and marshals.
NPR's Robert Smith reports that the arrests including members from all of the major East Coast crime families.
ROBERT SMITH: It's hard to understand the scale of today's mob bust. The indictments alone run hundreds of pages. Here, let me get them right here.
(Soundbite of thump)
SMITH: When stacked up, they are four inches thick. The handy color-coded chart of the seven crime families has more players than the NCAA tournament. There's no time to read the 127 names of the indicted, but I can read some of their nicknames to give you the flavor. They got Whiny, Tony Bagels, they got Jack the Whack, Little John. The FBI picked up Uncle Danny, Marbles, Skinny, Johnny Pizza.
If you had a meeting scheduled today with Junior Lollipops, Jimmy Gooch, or Baby Fat Larry, hate to break it to you, but they're probably speaking with their lawyers. The ever-understated attorney general, Eric Holder, allowed himself a little bit of hyperbole.
Mr. ERIC HOLDER (Attorney General): This is one of the largest single-day operations against the Mafia in the FBI's history, both in terms of the number of defendants arrested and charged and the scope of the criminal activity that is alleged.
SMITH: If you've seen it in a movie, then it's probably in one of these many indictments. Here, I'm just going to open up just a few documents here. We have the account of a gentleman named Bakalat(ph), allegedly running an illegal card game in Ronkonkoma. Here's another. The feds taped John Cavallo complaining that he didn't get his kickback and allegedly saying, I'll go there and I'll kill him. You don't know my name, right?
One more. Anthony Russo is charged with participating in the murder of an underboss, Joseph Scopo, as he got out of a car in Queens. The feds allegedly have Russo on tape laughing about it. There are hundreds more of these documents. Some of these crimes go back 30 years. So, why round up all these guys now? The FBI agent in charge of the New York office, Janice Fedarcyk, says they've been working all these cases and finally felt they had enough evidence. Part of it came from informants, whom she says are more common than you might think.
Ms. JANICE FEDARCYK (FBI Agent): The vow of silence that is part of the oath of�Omerta�is more myth than reality today.
SMITH: And with all these guys singing like canaries, the FBI was helped out by a little technology.
Ms. FEDARCYK: Dozens of court-authorized wiretaps allowed us to listen in on phone calls, and thousands of conversations were recorded by cooperators.
SMITH: All the profanity-laden threats and boasts that fill these pages will mean plenty of interesting reading tonight for buffs of organized crime. Today's indictments are a reminder, Holder says, that the mob is still around, still dangerous, still sucking money from businesses.
Mr. HOLDER: I think the mob certainly has been weakened. It is different from what it was once before, but the reality is it is an ongoing threat, a major threat to the economic well-being of this country, in addition to being the violent organization that it is and therefore deserving of our attention.
SMITH: That attention now turns to the court system.�Federal judges in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island will have their hands full sorting out decades of threats, extortions and the kind of drama only the mob can provide.
Robert Smith, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is expected to be moved to a rehabilitation hospital in Houston tomorrow, less than two weeks after she was shot in the head. Today, at the hospital in Tucson where she's being treated, her doctor said she's doing very well, that she has stood, with assistance, and scrolled through an iPad. Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, called her a fighter like nobody else I know.
Mr. MARK KELLY: I imagine the next step is here. She'll be walking, talking and in two months you'll see her walking through the front door of this building.
BLOCK: To get a sense of Gabrielle Giffords' rehabilitation to come, we turn to Dr. Jonathan Fellus, director of brain injury services at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey. He says one of the first steps is to see how the patient reacts to handheld objects.
Dr. JONATHAN FELLUS (Director of Brain Injury Services, Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation): The occupational therapists would start by putting various common daily tools in her hand, such as a comb or toothbrush and see if she used them properly. And that would let us know whether she's at a point where she can participate in her activities of daily living, her EDLs - bathing, dressing, grooming, hygiene.
The speech therapist is going to assess her ability to swallow, of her ability to communicate. That will quickly lead to, hopefully her being part of her own goal setting, which is a major focus in rehabilitation, is you want to incorporate the patient's own goals and have them express what they hope to achieve.
What we're really trying to do is take a comprehensive look at the cognitive, the behavioral and the psychological problems that are longest-lasting, hardest to treat and really get at the core of who we are as human beings.
BLOCK: One thing that's apparently still unclear is whether Congresswoman Giffords is able to speak. Talk a bit, if you could, about the process of language, assessing whether someone can speak, how much they can speak, and what you do to rebuild that.
Dr. FELLUS: Well, you know, we're particularly concerned about language. Obviously, as human beings, it's an almost uniquely human capacity. So it is of concern. We know that language generally, anatomically lives in the left side of the brain in the vast majority of individuals. We know that women tend to do better with language recovery, generally speaking, because their language circuits are more widely distributed throughout the brain than men.
But we also know that there's really not a backup system in the brain for language, because language is such a unique human capacity. It means it hasn't been around very long in the evolution of brains. And so, it hasn't developed backup systems the way, say, walking and running has. But language is really - it's a dedicated area in the brain and you just don't start cobbling together other areas of the brain to take up the slack when there's been a strike sort of at ground zero for language function in the brain.
BLOCK: I wonder, Dr. Fellus, with a case like this, where every step of Gabrielle Giffords' progress has been watched and reported on and heralded as miraculous, whether part of the job of the team at the rehab center is also managing expectations for the family of what they can realistically expect.
Dr. FELLUS: It's - certainly managing expectations is an ongoing challenge. I think the earlier you try and predict things, the more likely you are to be wrong. You'll either be overly optimistic or overly pessimistic. And I say that very clearly to families and sometimes even patients. It is simply guesswork early on in the individual case to try and guess what will be.
Now, that said, we know that more likely than not, there will be, if she is to have lingering significant problems, they're most likely going to be in the area of language, maybe some vision, maybe some other aspects of cognition or memory or behavior and likely some problems with dexterity or function of her right arm?
BLOCK: When you hear, Dr. Fellus, that Congresswoman Giffords has removed the wedding ring from her husband's finger and rubbed his neck, do those strike you as surprising, good signs?
Dr. FELLUS: You'd always rather have human recognizable behavior, behaviors that are typical to her personality. Obviously you'd rather have them than not have them. But I think it really is just too early to say and it's trying to infer too much from these tender moments, these over-rehearsed or over-practiced. These are, I don't want to say they're reflexive behaviors, maybe at worst they're complex reflexes, but I just don't think that we can take those - nor should we - take those and run with it.
BLOCK: Well, Dr. Fellus, thanks very much for talking with us today.
Dr. FELLUS: You're welcome.
BLOCK: That's Dr. Jonathan Fellus. He's director of brain injury services at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, New Jersey.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, a story about education, race, politics and budgets in New Orleans.
Louisiana's Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, is considering a move to merge two struggling universities there - historically black Southern University at New Orleans and the largely white University of New Orleans. Both schools have seen their enrollments drop in recent years and their graduation rates are dismal by just about any standard. But the president of the historically black Southern system said he was shocked by the idea to essentially remove one of its three campuses.
For more on what the move would mean for the city of New Orleans and for the nationwide network of historically black colleges and universities, we're joined now by Katie Mangan. She's in Austin, Texas, where she is national correspondent for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Welcome to the program.
Ms. KATIE MANGAN (National Correspondent, Chronicle for Higher Education): Thank you.
SIEGEL: And, first, a bit more context here. When we say, very low, dismal graduation rates, what are we talking about?
Ms. MANGAN: Well, in the case of Southern University at New Orleans, the most recent rate was five percent. And, of course that's over a six-year period. Southern University will say that that was at a time when the university was hard hit by Hurricane Katrina. But also, they'll point out that at many historically black colleges, the typical student is someone who's older, who's possibly married, working full time and they may attend college more sporadically, be in and out of college and having to leave for a while to earn money and come back.
And, also, because many of the historically black colleges have fewer financial resources, there is often less money available for scholarships. So, students sometimes have to drop out for financial reasons. But even taking that into consideration, I think most schools that have rates as low as Southern University know that they have to do whatever they can to increase them or their state funding and possibly federal funding is going to be at risk.
SIEGEL: And the University of New Orleans, not a historically black college, their rate is not as low as five percent, but it's not that great either.
Ms. MANGAN: It's not that great, no. It's, I think, somewhere in the area of 22 percent.
SIEGEL: Now, given the squeeze that most states and localities are facing in their budgets nowadays, I'm trying to put myself in the position of Governor Jindal. You look at two colleges very close to each other, neither one with terribly successful numbers, a nearby community college, I gather, that's bursting at the seams. There's - enrollment is way up and the idea of merging them seems to have a certain attraction. How common is that idea to merge local campuses?
Ms. MANGAN: It's becoming increasingly common. And, again, in states that are facing financial crises, this is something that lawmakers are increasingly looking to, to see if there's some ways that they can combine campuses and consolidate. But any time you start talking about eliminating a historically black college, a lot of people get upset. There's going to be a lot of lobbying to try to block this.
SIEGEL: This speaks to a larger issue within the historically black college and university community, which has been struggling to keep up standards and attract talented black students who can now choose Harvard or Stanford over Fisk or Spellman or Howard.
Ms. MANGAN: Yes, I think that's right. I think black students have so many more options today than they did back in the '60s or '70s, and as a result, the percentage of black students who are attending historically black colleges has decreased quite a bit. And that, you know, of course, has caused somewhat of a rift within the black community, just sort of looking at what is the overall value of a historically black college and, you know, how can you justify continuing colleges when you have some sort of duplication with other public colleges nearby?
SIEGEL: Well, Katie Mangan, thank you very much for talking with us.
Ms. MANGAN: Thank you.
SIEGEL: Katie Mangan is a national correspondent based in Austin, Texas for the Chronicle of Higher Education.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, a study that seems to show how the Army can reduce mental health problems among troops that are deployed to war zones. The American Journal of Psychiatry reports that when soldiers received additional screening focused on mental health problems before they deployed to Iraq, their units experienced far fewer problems than units that received more limited screening.
And it's not just because doctors were able to weed out those with the most obvious problems. The screening results were used to provide continuity of care, making mental health services accessible to those who were deployed and who had potential problems.
Dr. George Appenzeller, himself a colonel in the Army, is a co-author of the study.
Colonel GEORGE APPENZELLER (Physician Commander, Medical Department Activity-Alaska): Soldiers went into theater with a plan. They didn't have to re-engage in care once they got there. The plan was in place. The provider that takes care of them - just like your primary care provider back home - is ready, understands their issues and can reach out to them and make sure they stay engaged in care.
SIEGEL: So if I'm being deployed to Iraq and I had a prescription for an antidepressant back in the States, this isn't news to somebody when I arrive in Iraq - they know about me when I arrive and my needs will seen to?
Dr. APPENZELLER: Yes, sir. That's the core concept of the program is that it's not a new engagement in care. It's continuity of care throughout the entire deployment cycle that even continues to when they come home. So when a soldier comes home, we screen for any issues that they may be having and ensure that they continue to get that care at their home station.
This is the reverse. We take their care that they're getting at home on a day-to-day basis and make sure it continues when they're in theater.
SIEGEL: And the metrics of success here - when you look at the three combat brigades that were in Iraq, for you, how much better did they do? What's the critical number here?
Dr. APPENZELLER: In the first six months of their deployment, combat operational stress reactions were decreased, a risk reduction of 28 percent. Behavioral health disorders and thoughts of suicide were decreased, as well, and around the 50 percent range. And evacuations out of theater were decreased by approximately 50 percent.
This whole program was about taking good care of soldiers. And I think that the data shows that a good program of identifying those that have needs and having a plan in place to meet those needs improves their outcomes.
SIEGEL: And how much of a burden would that be for every unit that's deployed to have that kind of what you would describe as aggressive case management, as opposed to a more traditional mental health screening?
Dr. APPENZELLER: I can only speak to our personal experiences in this program. But we did not utilize any additional resources. It did take some more attention and manpower by the providers that are already there taking care of the soldiers. But we didn't require additional personnel to be moved into the units. And it didn't require additional screening assets, as we just added parts to what was already being done.
Time factor, however, it did take an additional - depending on whether someone screened, you know, to need the additional behavioral health evaluation before deployment - could add anywhere from, you know, 10 minutes to a half hour to the initial screening time.
SIEGEL: Is part of the issue here - achieving continuity of care for mental healthcare - eliminating stigma and having it understood that you can deploy with that prescription addressing your depression? When you get over there, there'll be somebody who'll be able to refill your prescription and take care of you there, too.
Dr. APPENZELLER: I think that reduction of stigma is critical to any behavioral health program, not just in the military but in society as a whole. And having people be successful, you know, within - all privacy was withheld, this was done discreetly. This was not anybody being told about it.
But soldiers being successful helps erase that stigma that it's going to affect your career or that, you know, people are going to look at you differently. So a successful soldier is really the best thing to fight stigma.
SIEGEL: Well, Dr. Appenzeller, Colonel George Appenzeller, thank you very much for talking with us.
Dr. APPENZELLER: Oh, any time. Thank you very much for having me.
SIEGEL: Dr. Appenzeller, a co-author of a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, spoke to us from Fairbanks, Alaska.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Now to your comments about our program, and a clarification. Yesterday in our coverage of the White House press conference featuring the Chinese president, we explained that he was speaking through a translator.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Well, that sent Judy Jenner(ph) of Las Vegas running to her computer, where she typed out this:
(Reading) I must correct you on your incorrect use of the term 'translator.' Translators work with the written word, while interpreters work with the spoken word.
And she adds, I am both.
BLOCK: So we checked with Corinne McKay from the American Translators Association, which represents both translators and interpreters.
Ms. CORINNE MCKAY (American Translators Association): So the main difference between translators and interpreters is that translators work in writing and interpreters work in speaking. I'm an NPR fanatic, and one of the only things I don't like about NPR is that your reporters consistently say 'speaking through a translator,' and you can't speak through a translator. You only speak through an interpreter.
SIEGEL: Duly noted. Well, now to yesterday's interview with Paul Janssen. He is a professor of physiology and cell biology at the Ohio State University. I didn't talk with him about cells. We talked with him about Legos. Professor Janssen built a replica of Ohio State's football stadium entirely of Legos.
BLOCK: Matt Weinberg(ph) of Irvine, California follows us on Twitter, and Robert, he tweeted this about one phrase that you used. He says: I love Robert Siegel for referring to Lego builders as Lego users. It makes Legos sound like a new type of drug.
SIEGEL: (Laughing) Lego-tics. And Mindy Stubsen(ph) of San Luis Obispo, California was left with a lingering question: What did he do with the stadium after he built it in his basement?
BLOCK: Well, we found the answer. Janssen plans to display his Lego stadium on campus and hopefully use it to fundraise for his research.
SIEGEL: Keep your emails and your tweets coming. You can write to us at npr.org or join us on Twitter at npratc.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The largest company in America wants to help you eat better. At an event here in Washington, D.C., Wal-Mart announced today that it's cutting the amount of sodium, sugar and trans fats from thousands of its products. Wal-Mart's executives were joined on stage by a special guest.
Ms. MICHELLE OBAMA: I am thrilled about Wal-Mart's new nutrition charter.
BLOCK: That's first lady Michelle Obama.
NPR's Brett Neely was at that news conference. He has this report.
BRETT NEELY: It's unusual for a first lady to appear at a corporate event, but Michelle Obama has made reducing childhood obesity her mission. And today's announcement by Wal-Mart fits squarely with those goals. Before she moved into the White House, Mrs. Obama told the audience she was a working mother and knows what it's like to cook for kids.
Ms. OBAMA: But I clearly remember that one of the things that made my life just a little more difficult was trying to figure out which foods were healthy and which ones weren't.
NEELY: Wal-Mart says that within five years, it will be a lot easier to find healthy food on its shelves. It's going to cut the amount of sodium in packaged foods by 25 percent and added sugars by 10 percent. Packaged labels will be clearer so customers can easily spot the healthy option. What kind of foods will this affect? Here's Wal-Mart executive Andrea Thomas.
Ms. ANDREA THOMAS (Executive, Wal-Mart): Salad dressings and lunchmeat and yogurts and boxed dinners and frozen foods and fruit drinks.
NEELY: Wal-Mart also plans to sell more fresh fruits and vegetables and make them cheaper for consumers. Plus, it promises to do so without squeezing the local farmers it intends to buy from. The plan is to use Wal-Mart's massive scale to cut packaging and distribution costs. It's the same strategy that brought you the $50 microwave, and this time in the service of bringing shoppers cheaper broccoli. That's going to mean working closely with farmers, truckers, nutritionists and thousands of other parts of an extremely long supply chain.
Wal-Mart CEO Bill Simon says the company is up to the task.
Mr. BILL SIMON (CEO, Wal-Mart): Complex challenges are a place where we think we have a role to play.
NEELY: As the largest seller of food in the country, when Wal-Mart wants something done, entire industries listen closely.
Mr. CHARLES FISHMAN (Author, "The Wal-Mart Effect"): When Wal-Mart says we're going to take the sodium in our private-label products down 25 percent, then everybody else in that world - Campbell Soup and Kraft and General Mills - ultimately have to follow suit.
NEELY: Author Charles Fishman wrote the book "The Wal-Mart Effect" about how the company is run. When his book first came out in 2006, Fishman was banned from the company's headquarters because some of his reporting was unflattering. He says that since then, Wal-Mart has realized it has to listen to its critics.
Mr. FISHMAN: Today's announcement is not an isolated announcement. It's in the context of the last three years of trying to both change how they do business and change the perception of how they do business.
NEELY: For example, the company has stripped extra packaging from its products, both to cut waste and lower weight, which cuts down on shipping costs, and Wal-Mart is making all parts of its operations more energy efficient.
The other context for this announcement is that Wal-Mart's once unstoppable growth has stalled.
Now, to get its momentum back, the chain is trying to expand from its base in rural and suburban areas. It's moving into the nation's cities, including Washington, D.C. Wal-Mart wants to appeal to shoppers like Rhonda Young(ph), who lives in the poor Washington neighborhood where Wal-Mart held its event today.
Ms. RHONDA YOUNG: Broccoli, that's my favorite, you know, but - and that's basically it, but it's expensive to eat healthy. It really is.
NEELY: She says she and her neighbors would all eat healthier if there were a Wal-Mart around.
Brett Neely, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
So what's the chance that all of this will change America's eating habits and improve the nation's nutritional health? We're going to put those questions now to Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who joins us today from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Welcome to the program.
Professor MARION NESTLE (Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health, New York University): I'm glad to be here.
SIEGEL: So what's the likelihood that these decisions by the nation's biggest grocer will make us eat better?
Prof. NESTLE: Well, they're going to have an enormous impact on the food industry. There's no question about that. They're going to force food suppliers, or the suppliers of packaged, processed foods, to cut down the amount of salt and sugar in their products. This will turn a lot of products into what are called better-for-you products and are going to raise an important philosophical question which is: Is a better-for-you processed food a good choice?
And that brings us to the whole question of fruits and vegetables, which I think is a much more important initiative in this set of initiatives...
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
Prof. NESTLE: ...and that is pricing fruits and vegetables at a level in which people can actually afford. The index price of fruits and vegetables has gone up by 40 percent since 1980, whereas the index price of a lot of processed foods has gone down by almost as much.
If they can change some of that and fill some of that gap and make fruits and vegetables more important, that could have a really important effect on people's health, especially the health of low-income consumers who go to Wal-Mart.
SIEGEL: I'm just curious about this notion of pricing of fruits and vegetables. We had a story on this week about what the housing crisis has done to citrus crops in Florida. I would imagine that the prices of fruits and vegetables aren't that easily manipulable by even as big a retailer as Wal-Mart. I mean, can they actually bring down the price of tomatoes seriously to make them more affordable to people?
Prof. NESTLE: Well, the big concern is that they're going to take the loss - the lowering of price out of the incomes of farmers who produce it. What they say is that's not their intention. Their intention is to take a look at their supply chain and make their supply chain much more efficient.
And, in fact, they're going to go into the supply-chain business as a result of this. And because of the efficiency that a company of their size can bring into the supply chain operation that they're going to be able to make it more efficient and therefore cheaper, and they're not, in fact, going to take it out of the hides of small farmers. I think we have to wait and see how this plays out.
SIEGEL: If you could locate some pressure point in the whole U.S. food system or the marketing of food to people and if you could fix that, you think it would have the most dramatic effect on American eating habits, where would you go? What would you try to take out of the food system or change in the way things are marketed and sold?
Prof. NESTLE: Well, I'm a public health person, and we always talk about root causes. The root cause of the problems in our food system is really farm subsidies and the way that they work. We support the production of corn, soybeans, cotton and wheat. We don't support the production of fruits and vegetables. If we want people to eat more fruits and vegetables, we need to change that in some way.
The other source of corruption, of course, is the way we fund election campaigns. As long as corporations are funding the campaigns of our congressional representatives, we're not going to get laws passed that favor public health. Our laws are going to continue to favor corporate health.
SIEGEL: Professor Nestle, thank you very much for talking with us.
Prof. NESTLE: You're very welcome.
SIEGEL: Marion Nestle spoke to us from Ithaca, New York. She's professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
This week's Sports Illustrated magazine lays out what it titles "The Case Against Lance Armstrong." At issue is whether the seven-time Tour de France champion has been involved in a doping operation throughout his career.
Armstrong is the focus of a criminal investigation by the Food and Drug Administration. A grand jury started hearing testimony in August. Selena Roberts co-wrote the story for Sports Illustrated and joins me now.
And Selena, this story is a combination of both new and old allegations, things we have heard before. What is - what's new and surprising in your report?
Mr. SELENA ROBERTS (Writer, Sports Illustrated): Well, I think what we did was we kind of drilled down a little bit into what the government is looking for here. And I guess, to simplify it, you know, the government investigators have to decide and really find out one major thing, and that is: Was the miracle of Lance Armstrong, were all those seven titles, the fame and the fortune, did he come by that honestly?
And what we did was we went back, and we talked to people who have been involved with litigation, you know, with Lance Armstrong, and we also did our own investigation to find out that there are several times in his past where red flags have come up, including if you go back to his Olympic years. We found that three times, his test registered abnormally.
BLOCK: Let's talk about, though, those three elevated test results. This was from '93, '94 and '96, and it was measuring the ratio of testosterone to epitestosterone in Lance Armstrong's blood.
You report that those first tests showed ratios that were abnormally high, but they were not confirmed by a second test. And Lance Armstrong is right, right, in saying that the B test did not confirm that result, this can't be considered a positive result.
Ms. ROBERTS: Right. And it was not considered a positive test. I think the curiosity and the intrigue there is why. Even Don Catlin, who was the scientist who deemed those tests negative, even he, when he looks back, he doesn't know why there was no confirming results to those tests.
So many Olympians in the past have failed tests and were passed on through a system where the United States Olympic Committee at some points have deemed the medals to be more important than really the welfare and really catching the cheats, that they've been passed through to the Olympics.
And what it appears to be in our research is that that indeed happened to Lance Armstrong.
BLOCK: We should explain that Don Catlin, the person doing these tests, is one of the most respected names in anti-doping efforts.
Ms. ROBERTS: That's correct. We also looked back at the minutes of meetings from the United States Olympic Committee, and Don Catlin is revealed in those minutes as to saying that he doesn't want to pre-test athletes before the Olympics because he doesn't want to catch them, in essence.
And he was sort of right there with a wave of Olympic committee members that didn't want to sanction American athletes before the Olympics because if you did that, then you wouldn't have an Olympic team.
BLOCK: You have some quite startling detail in your article, Selena, from an interview you did with Lance Armstrong's Motorola teammate, Stephen Swart, who describes a system from 1995, where they would have blood-testing machines in the hotel where they were staying. The cyclists would be testing their hematocrit levels. What did he tell you about why they were doing that?
Ms. ROBERTS: What it appeared to be to Stephen Swart and what he says it was was that Lance Armstrong, who was definitely the leader of that Motorola team, was instigating and pushing his fellow cyclists, his fellow teammates, to use a drug called EPO, which is a blood oxygenator. It really helps you so much in the mountains, and it gives you an incredible boost.
From what Stephen Swart was telling us, there were times when, you know, Lance Armstrong kept saying, you know, this is what we have to do to win.
When they were doing this, one important thing is to check your what they call hematocrit levels, which is to see, you know, just where you're measuring out because EPO is a very dangerous drug. And if your levels get too high, it can be dangerous, and in fact, it's been fatal in cycling before.
So what Stephen Swart has told us is when Lance was measuring his levels, they were hitting 54 and 55. And now, if you are a cyclist, and you went over 50, you wouldn't be racing the next time.
BLOCK: Selena Roberts, a number of the people you talk with for your piece seem to have an axe to grind or maybe even a legal case or a settlement with Lance Armstrong. How do you weigh their credibility?
Ms. ROBERTS: Well, I think that if you take the totality of who we talked to, maybe one or two of the people we spoke to had been in litigation. But Stephen Swart is not one of them.
Now, he's been deposed, but he went in, he told the truth because he was asked to come in and give a sworn statement.
BLOCK: Lance Armstrong, of course, has been asked about doping many, many times over the years and has always said: Look, I've been tested many times, and I've always come up clean. We ran your article by Lance Armstrong's lawyer, Timothy Herman, and let me read you part of what he said in response.
There were numerous inaccuracies. We found that Roberts did not provide us with specific allegations that we could respond to in a timely manner at all. We provided documents and information, court testimony and sworn affidavits to Sports Illustrated that were ignored.
What is your response to Lance Armstrong's lawyer's response?
Ms. ROBERTS: Well, for two weeks, we reached out to Lance Armstrong. We provided him topics that we wanted to discuss. We provided him questions that we wanted to have answered. He refused to discuss anything with us and went through his lawyer.
So there were certainly options for them to give us information. They chose to give us selected information and not the total information, and that was their choice.
We, throughout the entire story, whenever there was an issue, I think you would look, and you would see that Lance's lawyers had a response to them.
BLOCK: Selena, we explained that it's the FDA leading this investigation. The allegations go back many years. If Lance Armstrong were to be indicted, what possible charges might he be facing?
Ms. ROBERTS: Well, I think they're looking to find out: Did Lance Armstrong first of all dope? Did he have the ability to traffic drugs? Did he have the opportunity, and did he pressure his fellow riders, who would be considered sort of his employees, to take drugs? Did he take those drugs across international boundaries, if that is the case?
So a lot of things stem from whether or not he doped because if you consider that as the basis of the case, a lot of issues spring from that, including money laundering, including racketeering, including drug trafficking.
So I think there's a myriad of possibilities of what these indictments could mean.
BLOCK: And specifically because he was then riding for U.S. Postal Service, for the U.S. Postal Service team?
Ms. ROBERTS: Exactly. I mean, that - when you consider that the Postal Service is a government entity, and as a government entity, they funneled more than 40 to $50 million into that team while he was winning those Tour de Frances. So if he won those Tours deceptively and fraudulently, then there is an issue of fraud against the government.
BLOCK: Selena Roberts, her story in Sports Illustrated is titled "The Case Against Lance Armstrong." Selena, thank you.
Ms. ROBERTS: Thank you.
BLOCK: And in addition to Lance Armstrong's lawyers, we also reached out to Don Catlin, the anti-doping expert for a statement. He sent us this: The truth is what's important here, he writes. And I plan to do the best I can to determine what the reality is in this case, shed light on the situation, explain my point of view and provide the facts as I know them to be. That's been my creed for the past almost three decades in this field, and it remains my creed today.
Dr. Catlin says he plans to release a more detailed statement soon.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
China's president, Hu Jintao, paid a visit to Capitol Hill today. He'll be in Chicago tonight and tomorrow before heading back to China.
NPR's Jackie Northam looks at what was accomplished during President Hu's four-day visit and what issues remain between the two nations.
(Soundbite of music)
JACKIE NORTHAM: Swinging jazz was just part of the entertainment last night at a state dinner honoring Chinese President Hu. The lavish black-tie affair at the White House was a mix of American businessmen, entertainers such as Barbra Streisand - a favorite of Hu's - and successful Chinese-Americans.
The dinner topped off a very full day of meetings and pomp and circumstance for the Chinese leader, starting with a 21-gun salute on the South Lawn of the White House.
Nicholas Lardy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, says all this helped set a good tone for the summit.
Dr. NICHOLAS LARDY (Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics): First of all, all the arrangements went off flawlessly. There were no gaffs as there have been in some earlier visits, and that will look very good for President Hu back in China and, quite frankly, that was one of their main objectives.
NORTHAM: Lardy says both Presidents Obama and Hu went out of their way to stress the potential for cooperation and benefits to both countries. He says while the Chinese leader got his high-profile welcome, the U.S. also got a number of things out of the summit, including $45 billion in Chinese trade and investment.
China also agreed to stiffen its enforcement of intellectual property rights and to soften its so-called indigenous innovation policies, which discriminate against American companies vying for lucrative Chinese government contracts.
Lardy says all this sounds good but offered caution.
Dr. LARDY: What's really important is how certain commitments are carried out, and the language always has certain ambiguities. And one side will have one interpretation and the other side will have another interpretation. Now, hopefully in this case, the gulf between the two sides is very modest. And until we actually see it carried out, it may be premature to just declare victory.
NORTHAM: Lardy says there were other small signs of progress - promises to cooperate on climate change, clean energy and the environment. On the issue of human rights, President Hu acknowledged that China recognizes and respects the universality of human rights. In a joint statement, China also expressed concern over a North Korean nuclear enrichment plant.
But there was no movement - at least in public - on U.S. concerns over China's currency, which analysts here say is undervalued and harms U.S. exporters. President Obama addressed the issue during a joint press conference.
President BARACK OBAMA: So we'll continue to look for the value of China's currency to be increasingly driven by the market, which will help ensure that no nation has an undue economic advantage.
NORTHAM: There was little expectation that all of the many issues on both sides could be worked out. The U.S.-China relation is complex and often plagued with problems. Just over the past year, China stopped military-to-military relations after the U.S. sold weapons to Taiwan.
Evan Feigenbaum, the Asia director at the Eurasia Group, says this week's summit is an opportunity to help establish a personal bond between the presidents.
Dr. EVAN FEIGENBAUM (Asia Director, Eurasia Group): After a year of particularly tense relations, the visit - even though it hasn't resolved any of those underlying structural issues in a sense - has improved the atmosphere a little bit. It's helped to clear the air a bit, and I think it's a reflection of the nature of the U.S.-China relationship now. It's just going to be characterized by a series of issues that need to be worked through on an ongoing basis.
NORTHAM: Still, Feigenbaum says the U.S.-China relationship is now bigger than just government to government, and that domestic policies on both sides may do more to determine progress on critical issues than presidential summits.
Jackie Northam, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Election officials in Haiti say Monday is the deadline to file complaints stemming from the disputed November 28th presidential vote. This may pave the way, not only for a runoff, but for some clarity as to which candidates will actually be in that runoff.
Complicating the political mix are Haiti's former rulers. Former dictator Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier returned this week, and now, exiled ex-President Jean Bertrand Aristide says he wants to come home.
NPR's Jason Beaubien reports the political crisis in Haiti is not only growing more complicated, some observers say it's also growing more dangerous.
JASON BEAUBIEN: Haiti this week is a nation stuck between its past and its future. The country is revisiting the regime of a brutal dictator at the same time that it struggles to select its next president.
(Soundbite of crying)
BEAUBIEN: At Radio Kiskeya, tears streak down Liliane Pierre-Paul's cheeks, as she recounts being tortured by Jean-Claude Duvalier's secret police, known as the Tonton Macoutes.
Ms. LILLIANE PIERRE-PAUL (Journalist and Activist): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: It was very cold, says the journalist-activist, an opponent of the Duvalier regime, and they took me out, stripped me naked while everyone there was looking at me and commenting on my body. And they made me jump in cold water.
Pierre-Paul says she was lucky to survive Jean-Claude Duvalier's regime. Many other critics didn't. Human rights groups estimate Duvalier, known as Baby Doc, and his father Papa Doc Duvalier disappeared or killed some 30,000 Haitians during their three decades in power.
(Soundbite of demonstration)
BEAUBIEN: Police briefly took Duvalier into custody this week. And as he was driven off in a police convoy, dozens of his supporters waved banners from a Duvalierist political party and sang Baby Doc's praises.
(Soundbite of demonstration)
BEAUBIEN: Duvalier was questioned over accusations that he stole millions of dollars from the treasury during his 15-year reign. After about four hours, he was released. He could still face eventual arrest and a trial.
Duvalier's lawyer, Gervais Charles, says he's at a loss as to why his client returned.
Mr. GERVAIS CHARLES (Attorney for Jean-Claude Duvalier): I think that his trip here was very ill-advised, and I don't know why he came, really.
BEAUBIEN: Charles is also the head of the Haitian Bar Association and an adviser to one of the leading presidential candidates, Michel Martelly. Charles says Duvalier's presence serves as a huge distraction in the midst of a tense political standoff over the disputed November election.
After the preliminary results, said Martelly, was eliminated from the second round, his supporters rioted in the streets. Election observers from the Organization of American States were asked to review the results. They determined that Martelly should in fact be in the final round, but now, Preval's electoral officials say that report is just a recommendation.
Charles says, once again in Haiti, the people in power are attempting to cling to power.
Mr. CHARLES: We are trying to cope and see if we can have a democratic state, but we are not there yet.
BEAUBIEN: Further complicating things, former President Jean Bertrand Aristide issued a statement last night saying he, too, is ready to return from exile: Today, tomorrow, at any time, he wrote from South Africa. Aristide was flown out of the country in 2004 on a U.S. military aircraft.
Mr. JACQUES-EDOUARD ALEXIS (Former Prime Minister, Haiti): (Foreign language spoken)
BEAUBIEN: Jacques-Edouard Alexis says the presence of Aristide in Haiti would be completely different from the presence of Jean-Claude Duvalier. Aristide has a large following, Alexis says, and he's capable of changing the political landscape.
Alexis was one of the 12 presidential candidates who denounced massive fraud during the recent election and called for it to be annulled. Election officials, however, are pushing forward with the process and could announce who's in the runoff as early as next week.
Alexis says if the commission eliminates Martelly, violent street protests could erupt again across the country.
Mr. ALEXIS: (Through Translator) I believe that the country is now ripe for a violent explosion, and it's also fair to say that the transition to a democratic state has been a failure.
BEAUBIEN: President Preval's term is supposed to end early next month. Alexis and others are proposing that Preval step down and a provisional government be installed to oversee an entirely new election.
Preval, however, pushed through legislation last year, allowing himself to extend his term in office if choosing his successor gets delayed.
Jason Beaubien, NPR News, Port-au-Prince.
(Soundbite of music)
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
You are listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Twenty-six million viewers went there last night, and Robert, we're going there too.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
That's right because we are the program that considers all things, including "American Idol."
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: The show's season premiere was on last night, without cranky Simon Cowell or spacey Paula Abdul.
BLOCK: So we have enlisted our own cranky panel of pop-culture mavens.
LINDA HOLMES: Linda Holmes, the editor of NPR's pop culture and entertainment blog "Monkey See."
ANDREW WALLENSTEIN: Andrew Wallenstein, senior editor of the website Paid Content.
JASMINE GARSD: Jasmine Garsd, host of Alt Latino on NPR Music.
SIEGEL: Their mission: to see if this new "American Idol" is a hit or miss.
HOLMES: Watching the beginning of the 10th season of "American Idol" -it is the 10th season - it seemed a little bit like a sick kid's birthday party. You got plenty of plenty of clowns, and it's still sort of depressing.
The big news is supposed to be they added Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez. Steven Tyler obviously is from Aerosmith. Jennifer Lopez is a singer and she's an actress, but she's mostly just shiny and famous.
Neither of one of them, I don't think, turned out to have a particularly sharp tongue, like Simon Cowell did. He left at the end of last season. But Steven Tyler is definitely bizarre enough to be good to watch on TV.
Mr. STEVEN TYLER (Musician): (Unintelligible).
HOLMES: But he had a few problems, including the fact that he cannot seem to figure out what is and is not appropriate to say about the skirt that's being worn by a 16-year-old.
Mr. TYLER: It's just the right amount showing. That's nice.
HOLMES: That is just really gross is what that is.
WALLENSTEIN: But you know what, I'm glad you're bringing up Victoria because she was one of several instances on the show that proved to me just how badly the show is now missing Simon.
She, and there was another contestant, too, Ashley Sullivan, they just had no business being pushed through to Hollywood.
Ms. ASHLEY SULLIVAN: (Singing) Give me, give me that thing called love.
WALLENSTEIN: Now, if Simon was there, this girl would not have made it through and neither would have Victoria Huggins(ph). When you don't have the dark overlord that is Simon, you lack spine at the judging table.
Unidentified Woman #1: It's a yes for me.
WALLENSTEIN: It's not just about having someone who's going to rip these people to shreds. It's about maintaining a sense of standards, and I just didn't feel that.
GARSD: Well, you know, if we're going to talk about standards, it's just really hard for me to say which of all the auditions I like best because at some point, I found myself wondering, you know, if voices that I love, like Bjork or PJ Harvey or Billie Holiday had auditioned for this show, would they have passed?
HOLMES: No.
GARSD: Probably not. If I have to make a pick, as a former waitress, I'd pick the singing waitress, Devyn Rush.
Ms. DEVYN RUSH: (Singing) (Unintelligible).
GARSD: In a sea of overly made-up contestants, she was just like a hardworking girl with very little makeup, jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers, who was just feeling the music. And she really won my heart.
HOLMES: So if we had to look over the show and say yes or no, you're going to Hollywood, what would you say? Jasmine, what would you say?
GARSD: I just can't - no.
HOLMES: How about you, Andrew?
WALLENSTEIN: I'm going to side with Jasmine. The curiosity factor brought me in. I wanted to see how J-Lo and Tyler would do. I've seen enough.
HOLMES: I'd have to go along with that, too, and say no. So that's three nos, which means new "American Idol," dog, you are not going to Hollywood.
BLOCK: That's our panel of pop culture fans.
HOLMES: Linda Holmes, the editor of NPR's pop culture and entertainment blog "Monkey See."
WALLENSTEIN: Andrew Wallenstein, senior of the website Paid Content.
GARSD: Jasmine Garsd, host of Alt Latino on NPR Music.
(Soundbite of music)
SIEGEL: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Two literary obituaries now. From North Carolina comes news that Reynolds Price died today. He was a longtime Duke University English professor and he was, in every sense of the word, a writer.
Mr. REYNOLDS PRICE (writer): I've written everything from novels to television commercials. I once wrote the text for a Calvin Klein commercial, a confession I only now made public. But even I have yet to write an epitaph.
SIEGEL: That was from a commentary Reynolds Price wrote for ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. He was a contributor from 1996 until 2002.
Reynolds Price was a Southern writer. He set most of his books in his native North Carolina. And he was, in the words of Duke University President Richard Brodhead, a part of the soul of Duke.
His connection with us began with a story in 1996 about a speech he made at Founder's Day in 1992, when he called the Duke campus to account for what he called the most commonly heard sentence in the dining halls.
Mr. PRICE: The sentence runs more or less like this, in male or female voice - I can't believe how drunk I was last night.
SIEGEL: The speech launched a season of self-scrutiny at Duke. For the last 25 years of his life, Reynolds Price was paraplegic. That was the result of a malignant spinal tumor and the surgeries and radiation he underwent. He suffered a heart attack on Sunday and he died this afternoon. Reynolds Price was 77.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Bob Mondello says it's about trading the horrors of a prison camp for the horrors of a trek across the cruelest landscape on Earth.
BOB MONDELLO: Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As character) (Speaking foreign language).
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE WAY BACK")
MONDELLO: Unidentified Man #2 (Actor): (As character) We can follow the edge of the lake here.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE WAY BACK")
SIEGEL: Unidentified Man #6 (Actor): (As character) They won't all survive. But they will die free men.
MONDELLO: Unidentified Man #7 (Actor): (As character) Come on. Keep going. We must keep going. We must. Get up, or we die right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE WAY BACK")
MONDELLO: I'm Bob Mondello.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson traveled to the port city of Bizerte to find out how residents there are coping.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: The scars of the popular uprising that brought down the Tunisian president last week are visible here in this northernmost city of Africa. Alongside the many white buildings with blue shutters are the blackened remains of burned-down stores and offices. Most businesses remain closed. Graffiti calling the former president's wife a whore is spray-painted on a billboard. But residents of Bizerte say they are trying to get past their anger toward the former leader and overcome their fear of what's next.
NAJWA MADEAH: Unidentified Woman: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: Unidentified Woman: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: In recent days, a sniper fired into a crowd and killed one person. And resident Meqi Ben Ramadan says two men wearing uniforms of the presidential guard broke into his home.
MEQI BEN RAMADAN: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: The 52-year-old government worker says when he went to check on the noise, the black-clad guards wearing ski masks and carrying handguns chased him up the stairs. He says they fired at him, but missed. The bullets took chunks of plaster out of the stairwell.
BEN RAMADAN: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: Ben Ramadan describes how the guardsmen broke into his rooftop storage room and destroyed an ornate lamp.
BEN RAMADAN: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: He shows a visitor bullet cartridges fired by soldiers who pursued the gunmen.
BEN RAMADAN: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: Ben Ramadan believes the presidential guards came to his house because it overlooks a military compound across the street.
BEN RAMADAN: (Speaking foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: He says he's never been as afraid as he was that night, adding that his 23-year-old son is still afraid to leave the house.
SARHADDI NELSON: Resident Amin Ben Gharbia, says he, too, feels under siege. He also finds it interesting that Ben Ali loyalists are still fighting in his city, where about a half-century ago, the French made their last stand trying to hold on to this strategic locale after Tunisia gained independence.
AMIN BEN GHARBIA: Maybe because this city is too close to the capital and also it's by the coast. Maybe it's easier for them to escape, you know, on boats. We don't know yet, but also this city has got many mountains and there's many places where they can hide.
SARHADDI NELSON: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And while Nicholas Delbanco arrives at no simple sweeping judgment, he reminds us of how many creative artists defy the limitations of old age and sometimes transcend them to achieve new levels of creativity. Mr. Delbanco himself has been teaching and writing for over 40 years. And he joins us now from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Welcome.
NICHOLAS DELBANCO: Thank you. Good to be here.
SIEGEL: You write near the beginning of "Lastingness" about your own writing. I can remember when each morning seemed a burnished, shining thing, when every afternoon and night brought with it the possibility of something or someone not known before. Today, there's very little new beneath the fictive sun. So this is an inquiry that begins, really, with your own experience of writing and reaching the ripe old age of 68.
DELBANCO: Yes, I think that's true. It's not the sort of book I would've been interested in writing, much less reading, 30 or 40 years ago. But for obvious reasons, since you've named my present age, the business of old age is of incremental interest to me. And though I used as a kind of cutoff point the age of 70 and wrote about artists who at least maintained and, in some cases, as with Yeats, advanced - they are past the age of 70. That's no longer such a distant prospect, and I found myself staring at it.
SIEGEL: I think one of the most wonderful stories you relate here about an artist in old age is the story of the painter Claude Monet. I want you to tell us the story of Monet and the water lilies.
DELBANCO: Well, he became fixated on - compelled by the gardens of a house that he bought, about 20 miles outside of Paris, called Giverny. And over the last 20-plus years of his life, he painted almost exclusively the natural world. In fact, he painted almost obsessively up until he died at 86, and his habit of inward focused concentration is almost characteristic of the artist in old age.
SIEGEL: One thing about old age in the story of Monet is that in his 80s, he wasn't as mobile as he was when he was a younger man. He was sedentary because he was an old man, in part, and therefore, his universe had shrunk physically, no?
DELBANCO: Very definitely. I mean, the notion of those impressionists in winter, if you will, the ones who went out and stood in the snow and the ice with a little charcoal brazier...
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
DELBANCO: ...to keep them warm and stayed there for hours, that's not something that an octogenarian would do.
SIEGEL: That's a young man's ways.
DELBANCO: In Monet's case, I think, more importantly, even than his physical agility was the threat to and in the end the wreckage of his eyesight.
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
DELBANCO: So Monet focused on the visible world in very different ways in his older age, yes.
SIEGEL: And the works of his old age today are regarded as...
DELBANCO: As the masterpieces.
SIEGEL: The masterpieces.
DELBANCO: Right.
SIEGEL: "Lastingness," your book, is - this is not a journalistic or an analytic effort, and you write that a big part of your very limited investigation was sending the late John Updike a set of questions, written questions that he answered. And I especially liked his answer to your question: How have your aspirations changed?
DELBANCO: Oh, he was marvelous. I must say, Robert, that John's letter was an exception that proved the rule. He was so eloquent.
SIEGEL: Yes. He said, the aspirations have not been dulled, but after years in the mines, I am aware that my major veins have probably been dug out, and the urgency of my youthful, quote, "news" presses less groaningly. And he goes on from there.
DELBANCO: That's true, but it's also fair to say that he was always disparaging his own energy, his own enthusiasm, his own ability. I never, frankly, knew how far his tongue was in his cheek...
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
DELBANCO: ...but he was declaring himself finished in his late 20s, which was when I first met him.
SIEGEL: There's a natural tension here when we address the subject of artists being old. On the one hand, we associate old age with wisdom and experience and some knowledge about the world. On the other hand, it's the young artist who's seeing it all for the first time, who's capable of the truly novel first impression. And in a way, it's a lot less surprising to think that young people produce brilliant pieces of art.
DELBANCO: Well, I think that's true. And indeed, if one could do such a statistical analysis, it's probably the case that most of what we construe to be masterworks of our culture have been produced by people under the age of 40, only because very few people live past that...
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
DELBANCO: But in terms of the subject matter, and on the face of it, there's no intrinsic reason why an artist couldn't grow with age. But it happened so relatively rarely that I thought I would puzzle it out in this book.
SIEGEL: Nicholas Delbanco, thank you very much for talking with us.
DELBANCO: You're very welcome. It was a great pleasure.
SIEGEL: Nicholas Delbanco's new book is called "Lastingness: The Art of Old Age."
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
A second round of presidential elections has been indefinitely postponed. The first round marred by allegations of fraud and voter intimidation.
BLOCK: NPR's Carrie Kahn has this profile of the Haitian president.
CARRIE KAHN: At the site where tens of thousands of earthquake victims are buried, President Preval made a rare public appearance earlier this month at one of the commemorations of the January 12 catastrophe.
RENE PREVAL: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: Preval first took office after the popular priest-turned-politician Jean- Bertrand Aristide left in 1996, and he was re-elected in 2006.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR HORN)
KAHN: But today, it's difficult to find supporters, especially in the squalid encampments erected in the shadow of the destroyed palace.
CARLOS JEAN CHARLES: (Unintelligible) national policy, the devil's house, you know?
KAHN: It's the devil's house, says Carlos Jean Charles. He sells his paintings to foreigners who come to stare at the crumbled ruins through its tall neon green gates.
JEAN CHARLES: Rene Preval is the devil in this country, you know? In his time, we receive cholera, earthquake, tsunami. We don't need him in this country no more.
KAHN: Speaking in French and accompanied by his personal interpreter, Preval says he knows the people blame him for all the ills that have fallen on his country.
PREVAL: (Through translator) Here, I must say, I have extraordinary power.
KAHN: Breaking into English, Preval easily jokes.
PREVAL: What do you think?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KAHN: How do you want to be remembered?
PREVAL: I want to go home.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
PREVAL: That's it.
KAHN: In our interview, Preval said he is proud to be the only elected president not forced into exile. He says he wants to be remembered for his achievements: increasing agricultural production, electricity and paving roads.
PREVAL: (Through translator) I don't have a style of leadership that is like show business. I prefer to work and be efficient.
KAHN: Author Amy Wilentz, who has written extensively about Haiti, says Preval likes to work behind the scenes, but keeps a tight fist on power.
AMY WILENTZ: He doesn't lead the Haitian people, what he does is sits on the Haitian political class. For that, you don't need to be so visible to the Haitian people, but you need to be wily and manipulative.
KAHN: Reached at her Miami office, Youri Mevs, who owns Haiti's largest private ports and warehouses, says she hopes the U.S. goes, quote, "all the way" to make sure the democratic transfer of power in Haiti continues.
YOURI MEVS: The man needs some help in leaving honorably, elegantly. He does need help in doing the right thing.
KAHN: On the streets of Port-au-Prince, patience for Preval is wearing thin.
JAMES EDWARD: (Foreign language spoken)
KAHN: Carrie Kahn, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF CAR HORN)
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY: As he toured the GE plant in Schenectady, New York, today, Mr. Obama saw signs workers had put up showing where the gas turbines they were building would eventually go. The company ships turbines took Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. And under a new contract, GE's sending three-quarters of a billion dollars worth of generators to Samalkot, India.
BARACK OBAMA: Most of you hadn't heard of Samalkot.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: But now you need to know about it because you're going to be selling to Samalkot, India. And that new business halfway around the world is going to help support more than 1,200 manufacturing jobs and more than 400 engineering jobs right here in this community because of that sale.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
HORSLEY: Hoping that other companies might learn from GE's success, Mr. Obama named the company's chief executive officer, Jeffrey Immelt, to lead a new president's council on jobs and competitiveness. The panel replaces an earlier advisory board led by former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. In making the switch, Mr. Obama signaled that while the U.S. economy has begun to recover, it's still not adding jobs fast enough to replace the millions that were lost during the deep recession.
OBAMA: The past two years were about pulling our economy back from the brink. The next two years, our job now is putting our economy into overdrive.
HORSLEY: It's doubtful Congress will approve any more big spending measures by the government. So the president is asking the advisory board to focus on ways to encourage hiring an investment by the private sector. Many U.S. companies have been sitting on cash instead of hanging out the help wanted sign.
SIEGEL: The jobs panel will explore opportunities to boost manufacturing and exports. As he told workers in Schenectady, those are both areas Immelt knows something about.
JEFFREY IMMELT: We're a big exporter. Ninety percent of all the products made in this facility are exported outside the United States. So it's really a great example, I think, of what we want to do to really renew this country and this company.
HORSLEY: The White House notes that GE has created new manufacturing jobs in the U.S., even as the company also invests in plants overseas. The company reinvests about six percent of its revenues in research and development. President Obama says that commitment to innovation is crucial to the economy's long-term success.
OBAMA: We're going back to Thomas Edison's principles. We're going to build stuff and invent stuff.
HORSLEY: Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
We're going to talk about the State of the Union address and other political topics now with our regular Friday commentators E.J. Dionne and David Brooks. Welcome back.
DIONNE: Good to be here.
DAVID BROOKS: Good to be here.
BLOCK: E.J. Dionne, do you think that's a successful strategy to bit by bit dismantle the health care law, sort of death by a thousand cuts?
DIONNE: Democrats could talk about all the things in the bill that people actually like. And it, by some measures, it really is increasing in popularity. So, they allowed that - the Democrats to fight a fight again that they had lost the first time. And they began on a negative and they show no signs of having something to put in its place. So I don't think that was the ideal way for them to start, but I'm not a member of the tea party.
BLOCK: David Brooks, do you buy that? That maybe the health care bill is becoming more popular and that the strategy from Democrats and the White House to use specific case examples of people who benefited from the law are working?
BROOKS: But if you want to really control government, you got to take care of Medicare, Social Security. You got to at least begin talking about it.
BLOCK: So you think he's in the right. That may be a lonely place to be, E.J. Dionne. Do you think Paul Ryan, who is the chair of the House Budget Committee now, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, has a foothold here? Do you anybody's listening to him?
DIONNE: Nonetheless, I think that Ryan is going to have trouble with this, if you will, the tea party wing. And you're already seeing this tension between the leadership - Ryan, and speaker Boehner - and these conservatives who say, no, we can find $100 billion. Good luck to them.
BLOCK: David, what will you be listening for on Tuesday night?
BROOKS: Well, he has had a swing, and that swing is among moderate Republicans. If you look at the polling, all the movement has come among people who are moderate Republicans, wanted to register a protest against the Democrats, but now are sort of uncertain.
BLOCK: And independents, too.
BROOKS: And independents as well. And to me the crucial thing in the State of the Union is he's obviously going to talk about growth and competitiveness. But is it short term or is it long term? How much of the emphasis on short term trying to create jobs before the next election? How much of it is laying down the fundamentals for growth over the next decades, including big tax reform, big infrastructure spending, big education reform, the things that won't bear fruit in the next two years, but will in the long term. That to me is the central tension that I don't believe the administration has quite settled.
BLOCK: E.J., State of the Union thoughts?
DIONNE: Now, I think the conservatives are going to do two things. They're going to say, actually, he's retreating and then they're going to criticize him for not retreating fast enough. But my hunch is consolidation is a better way to look at it. In the speech we just heard, I think he's going to talk a lot about manufacturing because the old manufacturing states are hurting. They are critical to the next election. And I think that's going to be a central theme for the next couple of years.
BLOCK: State of the Union not often where we turn for lofty rhetoric, felicitous turns of phrase, is there any moment that you think that he might be able to craft out of this speech on Tuesday?
DIONNE: Well, you know, it is, we celebrated this week, the 50th anniversary of John Kennedy's inauguration, one of the great inaugural speeches ever. And what struck me in listening to it again was how much hope there was in public endeavor: together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths. It would be nice to have a little lift and confidence that we can accomplish things together again.
BLOCK: That was a speech. Hard to argue with that one.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BROOKS: I'm more in favor of those speeches, so let's let Obama give a few little speeches saying, hey, we'll try to make the economic climate a little better. It's probably the best we can do, but at least be realistic.
DIONNE: Think of the progress we made out of those promises. The desert's not much.
BROOKS: We got Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DIONNE: We have a lot of the - and it's a false choice. You can like both of those speeches, David.
BLOCK: A little uplift from E.J., a little pessimism from David. What a way to end.
BROOKS: Realism.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Thanks to you both. David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post and Brookings Institution.
BROOKS: Thank you.
DIONNE: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Albert Ghiorso co-discovered 12 chemical elements, more than anyone in history. He died in December at the age of 95. His memorial service was last weekend in Berkeley, California.
ROBERT SCHMIEDER: The reason he was legendary is because he seemed to be able to do magic things that other people couldn't do.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
That's fellow physicist Robert Schmieder. He knew Albert Ghiorso for 40 years.
SCHMIEDER: When you would talk with Albert, you were acutely aware that he was extraordinarily focused on the subject and his mind was extremely quick.
BLOCK: Ghiorso never got an advanced degree, no doctorate, just a bachelor's in electrical engineering. During the Second World War, he worked on the Manhattan Project.
SIEGEL: It was then that Ghiorso helped discover the first of his 12 elements: americium and curium. After the war, Ghiorso returned to Berkeley, where he co- discovered two more elements and took the opportunity to pay homage to his hometown.
SCHMIEDER: And those were named berkelium and californium.
BLOCK: Albert Ghiorso developed new instruments and new techniques to help discover new elements not found in nature. Rounding out the list are einsteinium, fermium.
SIEGEL: Mendelevium, nobelium.
BLOCK: Lawrencium, rutherfordium.
SIEGEL: Dubnium and seaborgium.
BLOCK: Albert Ghiorso died last month at the age of 95. That's also the atomic number of the first new element he helped discover.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Eleanor Beardsley has the story from Tunis.
(SOUNDBITE OF PROTESTING)
ELEANOR BEARDSLEY: Unidentified Woman #1: (Chanting in foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF TV BROADCAST)
BEARDSLEY: That surprised no one, says 22-year-old student Mehdi Hachani.
MEHDI HACHANI: Young people are angry when they watch the Tunisian TV. They don't see what they are seeing in the street.
BEARDSLEY: Hachani says everybody watched French and Arabic cable stations to get their news. His mother, Mufida Hachani, has spent most of her career as an editor at Tunisian state TV. She says the channel did not find the courage to broadcast the footage of the protesters and police violence at first. But on Friday night, after Ben Ali fled the country, the station did take on-air calls from angry Tunisians for the first time in its history.
MUFIDA HACHANI: I'm 56 years old, and I have been fighting for all this time. Never, we have never been free to run our stories. It's a victory. But I hope it will be a victory for a long time there, because they are still there and really, we are afraid.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BEARDSLEY: Unidentified Woman #2: (Speaking in foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF TV BROADCAST)
BEARDSLEY: A crowd gathers outside a bookshop on Habib Bourghiba Avenue. They're looking in the windows at books on display that were all banned just a week ago. I met the bookshop owner, Selma Jabbes, at last Friday's demonstrations right before the government fell. She spoke then about the difficulty of importing foreign literature. Today, she's beaming as she welcomes customers into her store.
SELMA JABBES: We have all the books that were forbidden. It's books about the families of Ben Ali, and all books about freedom and about liberty of thinking.
BEARDSLEY: Zeid Hafhouf says he's finally able to get a book written by two French journalists called "The Regent of Carthage." It's about President Ben Ali's wife, Leila Trabelsi, a hated figure here. He says everyone has been dying to read it.
ZEID HAFHOUF: I'm very happy. It gives me a good reason to stay in my country. Before, I was planning, like, to leave, because I said to myself I could not live in such a country where I cannot be free to read what I want.
BEARDSLEY: Mr. ALAEDDINE BEN AMOR (Radio Disc Jockey) We didn't have choices to choose our, really, our music. Really, sometimes, some songs that we had to broadcast on the radio.
BEARDSLEY: (Soundbite of song, "Mr. President")
EL GENERAL: (Rapping in foreign language)
BEARDSLEY: His new favorite artist is rapper El General, who has just been released from prison. Ben Amor puts on El General's scathing ballad about Ben Ali, entitled "Mr. President."
AMOR: (Soundbite of song, "Mr. President")
GENERAL: (Rapping in foreign language)
BEARDSLEY: (Soundbite of song, "Mr. President")
GENERAL: (Rapping in foreign language)
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
N: Andrea, welcome.
ANDREA SEABROOK: Hi. Thanks.
BLOCK: And when you talk about this focus of the Democrats on taking back the House, pretty tall order given how many seats they lost in November.
SEABROOK: But the Democrats are really changing their tune here. They have a lot of enthusiasm. They're talking about their agenda. And they're talking about what they'll do to convince Americans that they should be in the majority again.
BLOCK: So what is the message that they think could sell their ideas?
SEABROOK: And listen to Steny Hoyer talk about that.
STENY HOYER: We think we can bring business and labor together. We can bring conservatives and liberals together. We can bring all of our country together on the agenda of making sure that we make it in America, in both meanings of that word.
BLOCK: Okay. So, Andrea, that's the aspiration. What about the perspiration side of things, the hard politics?
SEABROOK: And listen to how he describes that work.
STEVE ISRAEL: This Drive for 25 is going to be based on two essential ingredients. One: We're going to offer constructive proposals. And the Republicans spent four years just saying no and not lifting a finger to help. We're going to offer constructive, thoughtful economic proposals to grow jobs like make it in America. And two: We're going to hold the Republicans accountable when they do not support the interests of middle- class and working families in this country.
BLOCK: Now, Andrea, the House Democrats heard earlier today from Vice President Joseph Biden. They're going to hear from President Obama tonight. What's the message from the White House?
SEABROOK: Well, I think President Obama will talk a lot about this sort of push for manufacturing and jobs in America. That has been his big push today. Those remarks will be closed to the public and the press. Vice President Biden spoke a lot about the wars, and about America being on track to get out of Iraq and start bringing troops out of Afghanistan, as well.
BLOCK: Andrea, thanks.
SEABROOK: My pleasure.
CARRIE FEIBEL: Unidentified Woman: We're going to go a little bit slow because we want to work on your control.
FEIBEL: Unidentified Woman: Feet are getting a little too close together, Kaylie. If you can get them a little farther apart. There you go. Good. Step. Step.
FEIBEL: Kaylie's father, Monty(ph), says she was in a head-on collision with an 18-wheeler three weeks ago. The 16-year-old suffered a brain injury. Now she's walking again but her legs are loose, her steps sloppy and slow.
MONTY SCHWARZ: I think they're helping her a lot with walking. You know, just getting her to take the steps and she's listening to all the commands. She does everything. They're good. I think the therapists are really good.
FEIBEL: CEO Carl Josehart says rehabilitation can't always rebuild the damaged body, but it can help build a new way of life.
CARL JOSEHART: We sometimes call that the new normal, that not everyone always gets a hundred percent restoration. But we help them achieve a new normal and try to reintroduce all the aspects of their life that are meaningful to them.
FEIBEL: Dr. Mark Sherer is research director. He says patients often push passed even the expectations of their family members.
MARK SHERER: So they come in and, you know, maybe they're impaired, maybe they have, you know, tubes and so forth. And, you know, generally they're getting better. Most people with brain injury get substantially better. The prognosis for recovery is good and the rehabilitation is what facilitates that.
FEIBEL: Dr. Gerard Francisco is a rehabilitation professor at UT Health. He will oversee Giffords' care.
GERARD FRANCISCO: The way I look at these technological gizmos that we have is that they supplement rehab; that not one equipment will be able to be a substitute for the touch and the encouragement of a therapist.
FEIBEL: For NPR News, I'm Carrie Feibel in Houston.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Welcome to the program.
STEFAN FATSIS: Hey, Robert.
SIEGEL: And let's go back to 1969, Stefan. Joe Namath famously guaranteed a win for his Jets and the upstart American Football League, over the Baltimore Colts of the National Football League.
FATSIS: Yeah, but you rarely hear the full story, Robert, which is documented very nicely in Michael MacCambridge's history of NFL, "America's Game." Namath made that boast at a dinner three days before the Super Bowl - Super Bowl III in Miami - where he was receiving an award as the best player of year.
H: Namath, we're going to kick your bleep. And that's when Namath said: Hey, I've got news for you. We're going to win the game. I guarantee it. And the Jets did, 16 to 7.
SIEGEL: So it was a very well thought out, analytical statement by Namath.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FATSIS: Yeah, exactly.
SIEGEL: But today's handsome, young Jets quarterback is named Mark Sanchez. He has not guaranteed a win on Sunday though, has he?
FATSIS: This week, Ryan must be taking a subtler approach, maybe because NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has warned everyone to quit trash-talking.
SIEGEL: Okay, let's talk about the two big playoff games this weekend. If the Jets win, they will have beaten the three dominant American Football Conference franchises in a row on the road.
FATSIS: First, it was the Indianapolis Colts and Peyton Manning, then the Patriots and Tom Brady and now the Steelers with Ben Roethlisberger. And, by the way, no team other than the Patriots, the Colts or the Steelers has represented the AFC in the Super Bowl since the 2002 season.
SIEGEL: Can the Jets defensive backfield again shut down the passing attack of another fantastic quarterback? This season, the stat I got from Mike Tanier of Football Outsiders and the New York Times: the Jets secondary has allowed just 14 passes of longer than 25 yards all season in 79 attempts. And that's real good.
NFL: the Steelers defense. It's allowed just 63 rushing yards per game this season, the third best in the NFL since it went to a 16-game schedule in 1978. If it can stop the Jets running game and force Mark Sanchez to pass the ball more, edge Steelers.
SIEGEL: Okay, let's move on to the National Football Conference championship: The Chicago Bears, da Bears, are hosting the Green Bay Packers.
FATSIS: This year, the Bears won in Chicago in September, 20 to 17. The Packers won in Green Bay in the final game of regular season, 10 to seven. Low-scoring games, a testament to the stout defenses of both of these teams, the Bears particularly against the run, the Packers against the pass.
SIEGEL: wind chill in the single digits.
SIEGEL: Wow. Now, there's also some real concern that these two games and the Super Bowl could be the last NFL football of the year because the labor situation is looking pretty bleak right now.
FATSIS: The influential Steelers owner Dan Rooney, who is now the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, just back in Pittsburg, and according to a tweet this afternoon from a New York Times reporter, said the two sides need to get it together.
SIEGEL: Thank you, Stefan.
FATSIS: Thanks, Robert.
SIEGEL: Stefan Fatsis joins us most Fridays to talk about sports and about the business of sports.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
D: One exercises the body, the other the mind. Despite those obvious differences, a group of booksellers meeting this week in Washington, D.C., visited a local bike shop. The point of the trip: to find out what they had in common. NPR's Lynn Neary joined the tour.
LYNN NEARY: From a sales perspective, Mike Hammanwright says, books and bikes are not as different as you might think. Both attract discerning customers who care deeply about the products they are buying.
MIKE HAMMANWRIGHT: To most consumers, our product is a passion product. Well, I think that's true of books, as well. I think people who love to read, they have a passion for books.
NEARY: Hammanwright, president and CEO of Revolution Cycles, says customers of both bike and book stores want a sales force that knows what it is talking about.
HAMMANWRIGHT: You're living on the edge of a sword, and so, if you're really good you'll do well. But if a customer comes expecting that expertise, and you don't deliver it, you're going to do very poorly.
NEARY: As the booksellers gathered in his store in Arlington, Virginia, Hammanwright handed each of them one of the brightly colored bicycle pins, which is offered to all his customers.
HAMMANWRIGHT: Hello, welcome. Welcome to Revolution Cycles. Did we all get our bike pins?
NEARY: The tour of the store was organized by the American Booksellers Association, which represents independent book stores. Meg Smith, marketing and membership director of the ABA, believes booksellers need to forge new relationships with other independent retailers. Smith says the emergence of e- books is challenging business as usual for booksellers, who are beginning to realize that in order to survive, they need to change.
MEG SMITH: This is part of that evolution. You know, let's go see what other people are doing. We don't have to be the private club anymore. The private club is independent retailers working together.
NEARY: Training, he tells the booksellers, is key. Everyone is steeped in the same approach to sales.
HAMMANWRIGHT: It's really about - we want to ask you questions to find out what are you looking for, what do you want to do with the bike. Is it for fitness or fun or racing or whatever? And if we're listening and paying attention, and we hear what you're looking for, then we can show you the products we have that we feel meet those needs.
NEARY: But it goes beyond just selling products, Hammanwright says. It's also about creating a customer who will come back for more.
HAMMANWRIGHT: So part of our process is to make sure that our consumer, now that they have the bike, what can I do with it. We actually want to encourage them to ride. In the end, even if it's a competitor of mine that sells a bike, that benefits me as a bicycle retailer because at some point they need a nutrition bar or a flat repair or want to get a new jersey or whatever. So I would rather they get a bike than a new TV, a new computer or go on a vacation.
NEARY: Revolution Cycles' newest store doesn't sell bikes at all. Instead it offers bike rentals and bike shares. Opening that kind of store was a risk, says Hammanwright.
HAMMANWRIGHT: I need some risk. I need to be able to feel like we're trying to make significant change. So - and especially in this industry, sort of like your industry, you know, if you don't evolve and change, what's going to happen?
NEARY: I don't run my business on hope, Hammanwright said, and those were the words that made the biggest impression on Annie Philbrick of Bank Square Books in Mystic Connecticut.
ANNIE PHILBRICK: Chris Curry of the Novel Experience in Zebulon, Georgia, liked Hammanwright's sales philosophy. Curry says if a bike store can get more butts on bikes, as Hammanwright calls it, then bookstores need to work on getting more eyes on the page.
CHRIS CURRY: We just need to grow readers and think about not just selling books but making reading books cool. So if we can do that and somehow incorporate that into e-books and figure out a way to sell e- books through our stores, I think maybe we have the start of a new model for bookstores.
NEARY: And with the tour over, the booksellers did what they would want any good customer to do: They shopped.
HAMMANWRIGHT: Unidentified Woman: They're both for me.
HAMMANWRIGHT: Fantastic.
NEARY: Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Associated Press reporter Juliana Barbassa is in Rio de Janeiro. She returned yesterday from the hardest-hit areas north of Rio. And, Juliana, you went to the town of Teresopolis. You got a view from the air. Tell us what these mudslides looked like from above.
JULIANA BARBASSA: From the air, you could really see the scope of the devastation. It wasn't one or five. It was dozens of slides, smaller, larger, rolling green hills, just scarred by these rusty- red strips torn in by the rain.
BLOCK: Once you got into the villages and started talking to the people who survived these mudslides, what did they tell you? What did you see there?
BARBASSA: It's very hard to describe what it's like to talk to people who have suffered this kind of loss. One man I talked to lost 23 of his relatives - his wife, his 2-year-old son, his father, and he was one of the ones I met who was spending his days ferrying supplies to people who were still alive and unable to get out. It's hard to describe what that looks like other than to say just there's utter desperation.
BLOCK: What were people telling you about government rescue and relief efforts? How hard has it been to get rescue operations going to these areas?
BARBASSA: It was very challenging in the first couple of days, in particular, to get official help. Roads were wiped out. Bridges were wiped out. The terrain is very, very steep. Helicopters couldn't reach many of these areas because of the constant rain, the wind, the fog. It was unfortunately very delayed.
BLOCK: Juliana, who lives in this area? It's about 40 miles north of Rio.
BARBASSA: It's a mixture of well-to-do residents of Rio, have weekend homes there. It's a mountainous area, but it's much cooler than the city. It's also a very agricultural area. They supply a lot of the fruits and vegetables to Rio de Janeiro, to the city. There are a lot of agricultural workers, a lot of ranches. You could see from the helicopter farms with horse barns and the horses loose in the pasture, as well as tiny homes stacked along these very steep hillsides.
BLOCK: Are there places now that were hit by these mudslides that relief workers just haven't been able to get to, where the scale of the damage and the death is just not known?
BARBASSA: But, again, if you saw the footage from the air and you saw how many of these happened, you can understand it will be a while before we really understand even how many people died.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Associated Press reporter Juliana Barbassa about the mudslides and flooding in Brazil, north of Rio. Juliana, thanks very much.
BARBASSA: Thank you.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
NPR's Kathy Lohr has the story.
KATHY LOHR: King said the organization refused to respect her leadership by delaying a response to her recommendations about the position and ignoring her questions about the job description.
BERNICE KING: I believe that I could only be effective if it were an executive-driven organization, and I did not have a desire to be merely a figurehead leader.
ANDRA GILLESPIE: It's not a surprise that she would come to that decision.
LOHR: Professor Gillespie says the ongoing dissension made it impossible for Bernice King to succeed.
GILLESPIE: There is this much division within the organization now, and she doesn't think that she really has the votes or the mandate to be able to carry out her own vision within the organization. Then it probably makes sense in her estimation to just cut her losses and let the organization handle its division right now.
LOHR: Clayborne Carson is a history professor at Stanford University and head of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. He says Bernice King leaves the SCLC with her reputation intact.
CLAYBORNE CARSON: No one person can turn around an organization that has so many problems. You know, a number of people have tried, and all of them have come up against a lot of severe problems.
LOHR: But Carson says the decision doesn't bode well for the future of the SCLC, an organization trying to figure out how to survive.
CARSON: There really is a lack of clear understanding about what the organization should be doing and how it should confront the problems of the 21st century.
LOHR: Some experts suggest the SCLC has been on journey to redefine itself for 40 years, but has yet to create a clear mission and find a way to help people as it did during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Again, Andra Gillespie at Emory.
GILLESPIE: Sometimes, it makes sense to kind of know when to fold. And this may be the moment at which the SCLC ceases to exist.
LOHR: Bernice King did not say that as she walked away today. But she did say the group's members and leaders will have to figure it out.
KING: I would hope that they are able to rebound and keep moving. I, you know, I think they certainly have the capacity to do that.
LOHR: Kathy Lohr, NPR News, Atlanta.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Here's NPR's Cheryl Corley.
CHERYL CORLEY: President Hu began his day with a visit to Chicago's Walter Payton High School, home to the Confucius Institute. In a partnership with public schools, the institute teaches about 12,000 students Mandarin Chinese. Alex Guiravich(ph), a sophomore, who started taking Mandarin last year, was one of the lucky ones on-hand for the president's visit.
ALEX GUIRAVICH: It's weird thinking that the president of China picked our school out of all the schools in the United States to go to. But it's cool.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CORLEY: Students from several schools waved Chinese and American flags and welcomed Hu in his native tongue. They treated him to performances, including a traditional Chinese handkerchief dance.
HU JINTAU: (Foreign language spoken)
CORLEY: Last night, at a formal dinner for Hu, Mayor Daley said it was a relationship that will endure.
RICHARD DALEY: Our long-range goal is to make Chicago the most China-friendly city in the United States and to establish it as China's gateway to Americas.
CORLEY: Speaking through an interpreter during the dinner, President Hu said there's been a substantial increase in the number of exports from Midwestern states since 2000.
JINTAU: (Through translator) Boeing, Motorola, Caterpillar, McDonald's and many other well-known companies have become household names in China.
CORLEY: This was the first time President Hu visited Chicago. And last night, a crowd of supporters rallied across the street from his downtown hotel. Student Ping Ting-li(ph) had traveled from downstate Illinois in hopes of getting a glimpse of Hu.
PING TING: Unidentified Group: Hu Jintao is a murderer.
CORLEY: Punsok Doji(ph), who had traveled from Minnesota, said talk about trade deals shouldn't dominate the conversation with China's leader in town.
PUNSOK DOJI: They consider that human rights is not a big deal, but the trade deal is the biggest deal. That's actually not a fair deal. The fair deal is the human rights is the fair deal and the biggest deal.
CORLEY: Cheryl Corley, NPR News, Chicago.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
But as NPR's John Ydstie reports, U.S. attitudes toward an emerging Asian competitor appear to have moderated.
JOHN YDSTIE: A generation ago, it was Japan's powerful economic rise that was troubling Americans. A movie based on Michael Crichton's novel "Rising Sun" captured the mood.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "RISING SUN")
SEAN CONNERY: (as Captain John Connor): You ever negotiated with the Japanese before?
WESLEY SNIPES: (as Lieutenant Webster Smith) Well, this is hardly a negotiation.
CONNERY: (as Captain John Connor) What is it, then?
SNIPES: It's a homicide.
YDSTIE: The movie was a murder mystery that stoked lots of fears about Japanese investment in U.S. industries. Michael Dimock of the Pew Research Center says in the late 1980s and early '90s, Americans had a much darker view of Japan than the current view of China.
MICHAEL DIMOCK: Japan was more uniformly vilified, or at least a broader concern for Americans, in the late '80s and early '90s than China is today.
YDSTIE: In purely economic terms, almost 70 percent of Americans thought Japan was taking advantage of the U.S. through unfair trade 20 years ago. That compares to 55 percent who think that about China today. That's still a significant number, says Dimock, but he says the sentiment toward China is more nuanced.
DIMOCK: There is a sense that China's trade policies are unfair. But at the same time, a majority tells us that they want us to build a stronger relationship with China, that China seems essential to America's economic future.
YDSTIE: Nearly 60 percent of Americans hold that view. So why do Americans take a more relaxed view toward China's emergence as an economic power?
ELLIS KRAUSS: Two reasons: One is that Japan came first.
YDSTIE: That's Professor Ellis Krauss, who's an Asia specialist at the University of California, San Diego.
KRAUSS: Japan really was the first big competitor to the U.S. after World War II. And that really shocked, I think, many Americans. But I think the more fundamental reason is that Japan and China's pattern of economic development has been very different.
YDSTIE: Professor Krauss says Americans also felt threatened by Japanese purchases of iconic U.S. companies and real estate.
KRAUSS: You know, the buying of Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures, of course, were the most symbolic of those.
YDSTIE: Ellis Krauss says military issues will likely sour American views toward China, too, as that nation expands its Navy and adds muscle to its air power.
KRAUSS: Americans are beginning to wake up to the fact that China is not democratic, and China is not a military ally of the U.S., both of which Japan was.
YDSTIE: John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Philip Reeves has the story.
PHILIP REEVES: This week, Warsi had this blunt message for her fellow Britons.
SAYEEDA WARSI: It has seeped into our society in a way where it is acceptable around dinner to have these conversations, where anti-Muslim hatred and bigotry is quite openly discussed.
REEVES: Plenty of people worry about this.
FIYAZ MUGHAL: There's a growing gulf of misunderstanding within faith communities and a growing gulf of misunderstanding between Muslim and non-Muslim communities.
REEVES: Fiyaz Mughal is founder of Faith Matters, an organization that promotes better inter-faith relations.
MUGHAL: This is worrying. This is a trend, and this is a trend that if we do not stop is going to lead to major divisions within the U.S., within Europe.
REEVES: Yet, says Mughal, the media usually takes a different view.
MUGHAL: The typical view taken of somebody converting to Islam is that they are somehow unbalanced, that they are somehow brainwashed, that they are missing or lacking something in their life.
REEVES: Recent converts include Lauren Booth, sister-in-law of Britain's former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Booth remembers how she called her mother to tell her she'd been to a Muslim shrine and was deeply moved. She was encouraged by her mom's positive response.
LAUREN BOOTH: So I said, I'm thinking of converting, and she said, that's no problem to me at all, and I was amazed.
REEVES: When she met her mother a week later, Booth wore the hijab, the traditional Islamic scarf.
BOOTH: She asked, why are you wearing that? And I said, because I've converted to Islam. And she said, Islam? I thought you said Buddhism, not those nutters.
REEVES: Booth hasn't yet told her brother-in-law Tony Blair.
BOOTH: I believe he's a war criminal, so I can't say we've had this discussion personally.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
REEVES: Unidentified Man: (Foreign language spoken)
REEVES: Unidentified Man: So when he was dying, he commands his people to look after women. Again, he didn't tell people: Go and fight.
REEVES: Some worshippers here are white British converts. They include a young mother, Helen Brooks-Wazwaz(ph). After prayers, she talks about her conversion, which was inspired by a visit to Egypt. She says her fellow Muslims welcomed her decision, but her father found it hard.
HELEN BROOKS: My dad's first reaction was you're going to have trouble all over the world, because his immediate instinct was, well, look at all these troubles that Muslims make, look at all these troubles that Muslims cause.
REEVES: There's a commonly held belief in secular Western societies that Islam represses women by compelling them to cover up. Brooks-Wazwaz says that's not her view of Islamic dress.
BROOKS: It makes me feel actually liberated rather than oppressed. As a woman in a Western society, you're very pressurized to try and wear something that you look your best and that people will look at you and think, oh, they look nice, they look attractive. But in Islam, your body is protected.
REEVES: Fiyaz Mughal of Faith Matters says everyone now needs to give a little.
MUGHAL: We need to stop just accepting the stereotypes about the other and start asking some questions about who we are and where we are going as societies.
REEVES: Philip Reeves, NPR News, London.
ROBERT SIEGEL, Host:
Joanna Kakissis reports from Athens.
JOANNA KAKISSIS: Twelve men wearing prayer caps are washing their hands in a musty basement in central Athens.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
KAKISSIS: Mohammad Jahangir(ph) was inside that night.
MOHAMMAD JAHANGIR: (Through translator) We were very scared. We were trapped, and we thought we were going to die.
KAKISSIS: Far-right gangs have stepped up attacks on Muslims. Greek police now guard some of the makeshift mosques, but the Muslim community worries the hate is spreading.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATION)
KAKISSIS: Rabab Hasan runs a phone shop in Athens. She was born in Greece to Egyptian parents and wears a hijab. She says because of this, people yell at her.
RABAB HASAN: FOREIGN LANGUAGE SPOKEN
KAKISSIS: Hasan switches to Greek, her first language, and says she considers herself as much of an Athenian as the people yelling at her.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANTING)
KAKISSIS: Across the street from Hasan's call center, Egyptian men gather at another makeshift mosque. One is Naim Elghandour, president of the Muslim Association of Greece. He has lived here for almost 40 years but says Muslims feel like second-class citizens.
NAIM ELGHANDOUR: (Through translator) We're part of Greek society until we go to pray. They go to a church; we go to a basement.
KAKISSIS: The powerful Greek Orthodox Church has had issues in the past about where the mosque should be located, but Father Gabriel Papanicolaou, the chancellor of the Archdiocese of Athens, says it supports the idea in principle.
GABRIEL PAPANICOLAOU: When the government approached us and told us that we need to do something like that, we said, of course, we are okay, because we understand that each one has a right to believe and worship in a free place.
KAKISSIS: Kyriakos Velopoulos is a member of the Popular Orthodox Rally, a nationalist party.
KYRIAKOS VELOPOULOS: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: Evi Hadziandreou, a special adviser at the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, says the government will keep the costs down.
EVI HADZIANDREOU: It is a human - basic human rights issue to allow the expression of religious beliefs. We're also moving in finding a temporary solution until the mosque would be built.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATION)
KAKISSIS: For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
North Country Public Radio's David Sommerstein has that story.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
DAVID SOMMERSTEIN: The short-term idea behind this canning exchange is to diversify your pantry, says co-organizer and farmer Bob Washo. Turn your bumper crop into a cornucopia of wintertime eating.
BOB WASHO: For instance, if someone ended up with a surplus of blueberry jam, they might be able to trade that for garlic that might not have done well in their garden or at their farm this year.
SOMMERSTEIN: There's a bigger picture too - a more sustainable food system supporting local farms and seasonal eating. The Corse family will rely almost exclusively on their harvest all winter long. They canned 327 jars. Thirteen- year-old McKenzie Corse arranges a rainbow of them into a pyramid: orange peaches, purple beets and yellow beans.
MCKENZIE CORSE: It makes me feel good that my whole family is eating food that came off our land and we're not, like, buying stuff that came across, like, the country.
FLIP FILLIPPI: If you haven't already, just try to label even if...
SOMMERSTEIN: Organizer Flip Fillippi lays out the ground rules. No money exchanges hands. No tasting. Those would violate public health rules. Just trading.
FILLIPPI: All right. Happy trading.
SOMMERSTEIN: And it's on. Jon Montan, maple syrup in hand, beelines across the room.
JON MONTAN: I traded one quart of maple syrup for three quarts, looks like, of dilly beans, sweet and sour for sweet.
SOMMERSTEIN: Fillippi and Matt Kidwell are deep in multi-jar talks worthy of a blockbuster sports trade.
MATT KIDWELL: Consider a ketchup in the mix? If you added okra to it?
FILLIPPI: Oh, yeah. I didn't get that. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I want to do that.
SOMMERSTEIN: Hey, wait, wait. Let's review.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
FILLIPPI: In the end, we went - I got Matt's fuchsia pickled turnips, the peppers, hot peppers and pickled okra.
KIDWELL: In exchange for ketchup, tomatillos salsa and blueberry jam.
SOMMERSTEIN: Today, there are canning blogs and canning cookbooks. A national organization, Canning Across America, teaches folks how to can safely. Swaps like this one are popping up all over. Here, there's kimchi and fig wine and chutney. Half of the swappers are in their 20s and 30s. And they're really into it.
LOUISE GAVA: Why wouldn't you love sitting around hull - you know, shelling beans or something like that on an afternoon instead of watching a movie?
SOMMERSTEIN: Oh, maybe not everyone's idea of a good time, concedes Louise Gava. But she says canning and swapping builds on tradition and conversation around food.
GAVA: And we're talking about recipes. We're saying, oh, apple ketchup. Well, what's in that? Is that tomatoes or is it - oh, no. It's just apples but with ketchup spicing. And what would you use that for? Oh, meat. Well...
SOMMERSTEIN: Farmer Flip Fillippi says a canning swap extends the joys of the harvest.
FILLIPPI: It's like you're taking home everyone's little slice of garden or the way that they like to turn their food into something they can eat in the winter.
SOMMERSTEIN: And on the darkest, coldest days of the year, there's nothing better than a reminder of summer.
FILLIPPI: You know, so what do we have here?
SOMMERSTEIN: For NPR News, I'm David Sommerstein in Canton, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
For 68-year-old film critic Roger Ebert, age has brought with it what would it seem to many to be an insurmountable challenge. In 2006, the longtime reviewer for the Chicago Sun-Times lost his lower jaw and his voice to cancer surgery, but he lost neither his love for movies nor his passion for talking about them. So last year, he unveiled a new voice made with the help of a computer.
PBS, Host:
He returns to television for the first time since 2006 with his PBS program "Ebert Presents at the Movies." The new show has two co-hosts who do most of the reviewing, but there is a segment called Roger's Office when fans will hear directly from Ebert.
ROGER EBERT: 453651, this year's Truer than Fiction Award at the Indie Spirits and the jury prize at South by Southwest. I think it's a real discovery on DVD, and I give it a big thumbs up.
BLOCK: At times, Ebert's reviews will also be read by a special guest. That's the case tonight when acclaimed German director Werner Herzog reads Ebert's review of the film "My Dog Tulip."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EBERT PRESENTS AT THE MOVIES")
WERNER HERZOG: Almost all human beings desire one thing, and that is to be loved. This is Werner Herzog speaking as Roger's voice.
: It's certainly a departure from the loud playful sparring of Siskel and Ebert, but even when it's coming out of someone else's mouth, Ebert's voice is unmistakable.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "EBERT PRESENTS AT THE MOVIES")
HERZOG: This is a wonderful film, reassuring us that sometimes love really is a bitch.
: Roger Ebert, a lesson in lastingness.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
One February afternoon in 1902, a woman named Ida Craddock was about to be arrested. She was what you might call today a sexologist. But in 1902, many people considered her how-to guides on sex to be filth. And so that cold February day, four officials with a search warrant knocked on Craddock's front door on West 23rd Street in New York City.
Leading the way was Anthony Comstock, the powerful head of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Mr. LEIGH ERIC SCHMIDT (Author, "Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock"): (Reading) Craddock well knew that Comstock and his three deputies had come to her apartment to take her into custody. But as Craddock stood waiting for Comstock to finish inspecting her belongings, she heard the great "apostle of purity," as she wryly called him, whistling a tune with a particularly composed and calm air. The federally appointed protector of innocent youth was humming the music of "the Koochy-Koochy Dance," a notorious form of belly dancing only recently introduced to American audiences and one that had quickly become a byword for sensually charged dancing, the Hootchy-Cootchy or Danse Du Ventre.
RAZ: That's Harvard Professor Leigh Eric Schmidt reading from his new book. It's called "Heaven's Bride," and it tells the story of Ida C. Craddock, a turn of the century mystic, scholar, sex therapist and ultimately civil liberties martyr. Leigh Eric Schmidt is at member station KMOX in St. Louis.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. SCHMIDT: Thanks for having me on.
RAZ: So we just heard about 1902, which was the last time Ida Craddock was arrested before her death, which we'll get to later. But talk a little about the year 1893 and the Chicago World's Fair, because that was really the start of Ida Craddock's journey into becoming this icon for sexual liberation.
Mr. SCHMIDT: The Chicago World's Fair was a huge event in 1893. Millions and millions of Americans went there as tourists to see everything that was on display. And certainly, the one that got the most media attention at the time was what was going on in the Egyptian theater, and that was this belly dancing show.
And many people were scandalized by it and they thought, well, is there any way we can shut this thing down? I mean, this is a horrible orgy. All this filth from the Orient is pouring into America. Let's try to shut this down. So they necessarily said, let's get Anthony Comstock to come in. He's the most powerful vice crusader of the day. Let's get him to come in.
And sure enough, he decides it's debauched and wants to close it down. And at that point, Ida Craddock publishes a defense of belly dancing and a defense of the shows that are going on in the Egyptian theater. That puts her on the radar screen as a kind of eccentric sex reformer in her day. So that's how Craddock enters into this initial fray with Comstock.
RAZ: I want to ask you about Anthony Comstock in a moment. But how does Craddock go from defending belly dancing in 1893 to becoming this voice for sexual liberation, this person who writes how-to guides, sex guides, for married couples?
Mr. SCHMIDT: It's a circuitous path, that's for sure. I mean, one of the things that really is leading her into this is that she's been doing a lot of reading in folklore and comparative religions and comparative mythology. And she thinks she's discovered that ancient religions were originally much more open to sex. And that has made her interested in this possibility of somehow recovering that world.
And then belly dancing becomes this catalyst for her to decide, hey, this is the reform work I really want to do, and she starts putting together these little how-to guides.
RAZ: She was arrested a number of times, and her main nemesis, who we've mentioned, is Anthony Comstock. He was the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. It sounds like something out of Saudi Arabia or Iran. It's amazing that there was such a group in America, but this is Victorian America. How did he become so powerful?
Mr. SCHMIDT: Right. Comstock really wants a badge, and he lobbies Congress in the early 1870s to create an anti-obscenity law.
RAZ: This is a law that becomes known as the Comstock Act.
Mr. SCHMIDT: Exactly. This is a law that's basically named for him, the Comstock Act or the Comstock Law.
RAZ: A law that he - and he can effectively judge what is indecent and what is not.
Mr. SCHMIDT: Right. So Comstock has that going for him. He has an incredible success rate by the time he's really taking on Craddock in 1902. He's had 2,000-plus convictions. He doesn't lose that many cases.
RAZ: In 1902, he shows up at Ida Craddock's apartment in New York City with three other officials. They have a warrant to search the property, and they arrest her. What happens after that?
Mr. SCHMIDT: Well, they arrest her there in February. And he's able to quickly bring charges against her at two levels. He's able to get her on a state anti-obscenity law, and he's also able to indict her in federal court. So in a sense, what he has her is in double legal jeopardy.
RAZ: And that's because she used the postal service to mail these pamphlets.
Mr. SCHMIDT: Right. Absolutely. The federal charge is based on her putting obscene materials in the mail in violation of the Comstock Act. The state trial comes up first. And it becomes clear pretty quickly that, you know, Comstock has her in a court that's highly favorable to his view, and she loses the case and is put in jail for three months at that point.
She gets out of jail in June 1902. At this point, she's become something of a civil liberties hero.
RAZ: So she starts to test Comstock at this point, right?
Mr. SCHMIDT: Right. I mean, now, people are picking up this story. I mean, here is someone who's claiming her right to freedom of expression, freedom of speech and Comstock has thrown her in jail. But Comstock still has the federal trial and that is, you know, set for a few months later.
And again, she's a repeat offender at this point. She's really fearful that if she's found guilty, she's going to get the maximum sentence here. She'd get five years imprisonment, perhaps a hefty fine. And so she really sees all the chips being on the table in that last trial.
RAZ: So she decides that she is not going to show up for the sentencing. And what happens that day?
Mr. SCHMIDT: She has decided that the deck is stacked against her. And so the night before the sentencing, she writes two notes: one to her mother and one to Anthony Comstock. She then methodically goes about sealing up her room and turns on the gas and is then found dead the next morning by her mother. She felt like the only option at that point was suicide, that that was the only way she was going to die a free woman.
RAZ: When you consider her legacy, where would you place her? I mean, would you place her alongside Alfred Kinsey and Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem?
Mr. SCHMIDT: I would place her alongside Alfred Kinsey in a certain way. I mean, she certainly pushes this conversation about sex education, sexual enlightenment as being an important form of expression. She certainly has affinities with a figure like Susan B. Anthony. She is a feminist. You know, she's also, though, an eccentric, and in all kinds of ways, just crosses up our categories.
I mean - and there's something about Craddock that's just lost in translation as time wears on.
RAZ: That's Leigh Eric Schmidt. He teaches religious history at Harvard. His new book is called "Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock."
Leigh Eric Schmidt, thank you.
Mr. SCHMIDT: Thank you.
(Soundbite of song, "Bird Stealing Bread")
IRON AND WINE: Tell me baby, tell me. Are you still on the stoop watching the windows close?
GUY RAZ, host:
This is the music that made legions of fans fall in love with the band Iron and Wine back in 2002. But actually, at that point, it wasn't much of a band at all. Iron and Wine was one man named Sam Beam alone with his guitar. The songs were barely whispers, delicate, tender home recordings. Now, a decade into his recording career, Sam Beam has gone through a series of transformations.
His latest album is called "Kiss Each Other Clean," and it's a whole new Iron and Wine.
(Soundbite of song, "Big Burned Hand")
IRON AND WINE: (Singing) When the arrogant goddess of love came to steal my shoes.
RAZ: That is the same artist. And Sam Beam is here with me in NPR's performance studio.
Sam Beam, welcome to NPR.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. SAM BEAM (Singer): Hey, Guy. How's it going?
RAZ: What a contrast in sounds. I mean, obviously, a major change.
Mr. BEAM: That's funny. I hadn't listened to them back, you know, side by side like that. That was interesting. As someone who's working and recording music and writing songs, I mean, you just keep moving forward.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. BEAM: You know, you don't think about really.
RAZ: I mean, there was a saxophone in that and...
Mr. BEAM: Hell, yeah. There's a saxophone.
RAZ: Amazing. I mean, it has this kind of J.J. Cale southern shuffle sound to it.
Mr. BEAM: Yeah.
RAZ: And - but you - for such a long time, you were a man with a guitar.
Mr. BEAM: I remember, you know, the early days trying to find the right setting for, you know, a group of lyrics or something, you know, the perfect stage for a set of lyrics. Whereas now, you know, as you get into it, you keep trying to surprise yourself and push yourself into new areas because putting out the same record's boring.
RAZ: I want to take a listen to another song off the new Iron and Wine album. This one's called "Walking Far from Home."
(Soundbite of song, "Walking Far from Home")
IRON AND WINE: (Singing) I was walking far from home, where the names were not burned along the wall. Saw a wet road form a circle and it came like a call, came like a call from the Lord.
RAZ: That song ends with a line: It came like a call from the Lord. And then...
Mr. BEAM: Yeah. Right.
RAZ: ...a lot of religious themes scattered...
Mr. BEAM: Yeah. Yeah.
RAZ: ...you know, throughout your work. Why do you keep going back to...
Mr. BEAM: Well, I mean, I grew up in South Carolina. You know, it's kind of a big deal there.
RAZ: Is it a big deal to you?
Mr. BEAM: Well, you know, it's part of my upbringing. We went to church. And, you know, that's the characters that we were taught to learn about morality. And then, you know, at the same time, it's an easy way to say - for instance, there's a song that includes Cain and Abel.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. BEAM: And I could say, you know, Joe and Bob who represent, one is jealous and cruel, one is innocent and, you know, everything we want to be, but at the same time they represent the duality that lives in each of us. You know, you could get into all of that, but - or I could just say Cain and Abel went to McDonald's and smoked a bag of weed and, you know, and it means something else, you know?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BEAM: It creates an economy of language.
RAZ: Sam, since I have you here in the studio, I wonder if I could get you -and you have a guitar with you, not your saxophone - this time - but I was wondering if I...
Mr. BEAM: That wouldn't be fun, trust me.
RAZ: I'm sure it'd be fun. I'm hoping that you could play us a song.
Mr. BEAM: Sure. This song is called "Tree by the River"
(Soundbite of song, "Tree by the River")
Mr. BEAM: (Singing) Mary Anne, do you remember the tree by the river when we were 17? The dark canyon wall, the call and the answer, and the mare in the pasture, pitch black and baring its teeth. I recall the sun in our faces, stuck and leaning on graces and being strangers to change. The radio and the bones we found frozen, and all the thorns and the roses beneath your windowpane.
Now I'm asleep in a car. I mean the world to a potty-mouth girl and a pretty pair of blue-eyed birds. Time isn't kind or unkind, you like to say, but I wonder to who and what it is you're saying today.
Now I'm asleep in a car. I mean the world to a potty-mouth girl and a pretty pair of blue-eyed birds. Time isn't kind or unkind, you like to say, but I wonder to who and what it is you're saying today.
Mary Anne, do you remember the tree by the river when we were 17? Dark canyon road, I was coy in the half-moon, happy just to be with you and you were happy for me.
RAZ: What a beautiful song.
Mr. BEAM: Well, thanks.
RAZ: That was Sam Beam. He is Iron and Wine, and that song's called "Tree by the River." It's on his new record, "Kiss Each Other Clean." Again, what a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful song.
Mr. BEAM: Thanks, Guy. Appreciate that.
RAZ: And that song, like a lot of your songs, is so visual. It's almost like you're describing scenes from a silent film. The tree by the river, the dark canyon road...
Mr. BEAM: Right.
RAZ: ...the half-moon. Do you try to make it visual?
Mr. BEAM: I guess, you know, I went to an art school. I got into cinema.
RAZ: You even taught filmmaking at the time.
Mr. BEAM: Yeah. So, you know, I'm drawn to this sort of visual communication style. I find it leaves room for the viewer or the listener or whatever to participate with you. The song doesn't succeed on whether I explain my point sufficiently. You set up a few different images and make connections between the two. And the listener can make their own assumptions of what things mean -you know, a tree by the river, you know, the tree means something, a river means something, then what you describe after that paints those images, you know?
RAZ: You are - I mean, you have a film background. You kind of fell into the music business. I mean, this was your hobby, you said.
Mr. BEAM: Right. Yes. I got a phone call from Sub Pop, this record label from Seattle. You know, Sub Pop, like Nirvana Sub Pop.
RAZ: Yeah. Right.
Mr. BEAM: And so, I was like, are you sure you have the right number?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BEAM: You know, at the same time, I had children. So it wasn't like I could just drop everything and go do music. I had to really consider. But at the end of the day, it seemed a lot more fun than teaching class, to be honest.
RAZ: Yeah. That's Sam Beam. He's better known as Iron and Wine. His new album is called "Kiss Each Other Clean."
Sam Beam, thank you so much.
Mr. BEAM: Thank you, Guy.
RAZ: And would you mind leaving us with one more song before you take off?
Mr. BEAM: Sure, sure. This song is called "Half Moon."
(Soundbite of song, "Half Moon")
RAZ: And if you'd like to hear both of the songs Sam Beam performed in our studio and his Tiny Desk concert, they're at our website, nprmusic.org.
(Soundbite of song, "Half Moon")
Mr. BEAM: (Singing) Halfway home in the hilltop trees and all our footprints in the snow and the evening glow leaving. Low night noise in the wintertime, I wake beside you on the floor...
RAZ: And for Saturday, that's Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz. Remember, you can hear the best of this program on a new podcast, Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. We post a new episode on Sunday nights. Subscribe or listen at iTunes or at npr.org/weekendatc. We're back on the radio tomorrow. Until then, thanks for listening and have a great night.
GUY RAZ, host:
Behind all the rhetoric over the health care law is a constitutional debate over authority, the power to compel. Now, one of the key objections from most Republican lawmakers is what's called the individual mandate. That's the law that will require almost every American to become insured by 2014.
Now the idea is that as the marketplace for insurance grows, so will competition, and the price for getting coverage will go down and it will save taxpayers' money, money that goes to pay for health care costs for the uninsured who get treatment but can't pay for it.
Now many Republicans say they don't have a problem with that idea; it's just that they believe Congress doesn't have the constitutional authority to make people buy insurance. We'll explore that question from both sides. That's our cover story today.
But first to the case of Camden, New Jersey. It's where physician and writer Atul Gawande recently went to find out how the city's medical system started to tackle skyrocketing medical costs.
Dr. ATUL GAWANDE (Endocrine Surgeon, Brigham and Women's Hospital; Journalist): One of the people I met was a man who was in his 50s with a liver cancer, didn't have insurance, was trying to use an emergency room to get treatment and it just wasn't going to happen.
RAZ: He would show up and what would happen?
Dr. GAWANDE: They would treat the immediate problem and tell him he needed to go find a doctor who would help get him treatment for his cancer.
RAZ: But every few weeks, even days, the man would show up at the emergency room complaining of pain.
Dr. GAWANDE: They would give him pain medication. They would give him CT scans to see what was going on, the source of the pain, maybe it was an appendicitis this time. Make sure it's not that. What he didn't have was a consistent person who knew him, could work with him through the series of things that happen to a patient with what turns out to be a cancer of the liver.
RAZ: In most cities, including Camden, 5 percent of patients account for 60 percent of health care costs and many of them are uninsured. And in the case of the liver cancer patient...
Dr. GAWANDE: His costs had risen so high that he'd turned up as a hot spot in the Camden cost data.
RAZ: Treatment that often costs up to $50,000 a year per patient. And Atul Gawande says what often happens in these cases is that emergency rooms themselves end up paying the costs.
Dr. GAWANDE: The hospital at that point chalks it up as uncompensated care. They set collection agencies on people who haven't paid their emergency room bill, but eventually they write it off. The state then will often pay for it. There are uncompensated care pools in most states where they help try to offset the losses that hospitals have from the patients coming in. The costs mount and mount, but no one actually looks at solving the problems.
RAZ: There's a lot more to this story. You can read it in the latest issue of The New Yorker. Atul Gawande also practices at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and he teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Now, many conservative lawmakers would agree that the story we just heard is a problem, and some might even agree with the idea that if everyone were insured, health insurance costs would fall for everyone. But what those same conservatives object to is the idea that everyone must have insurance. They say that the commerce clause in the Constitution and even Congress' tax authority doesn't cover this question.
Here's California Congressman Dan Lungren, a Republican.
Representative DAN LUNGREN (Republican, California): What Congress has attempted to do, and the president by signing the bill, is to say that the individual citizen, you are required to enter into a contract, that is you're required to buy a product, in this case something called health care insurance or health care coverage. And if you do not, you'll suffer a penalty.
So if you accept the fact that one's participation in one's own health care is somehow a matter of interstate commerce, in this case it goes even beyond that. It says that if you refuse to enter interstate commerce - that is, if you consciously decide to be inactive - that in and of itself is a type of interstate commerce.
I mean, it's a question that if you answer it in the way that those who support this bill answer it, it leaves you no room to - well, for any concept of freedom if you really think about it.
RAZ: So you would argue, just to clarify, that health insurance is not a form of commerce.
Rep. LUNGREN: In this particular case, it goes beyond that. It goes to the question of whether you can be mandated to enter into it. I mean, the famous case decades ago goes to the question of whether someone who is a farmer and is growing weed, I think it was, or corn or whatever the commodity was, could produce it in their own backyard or basically in a small part of their farm for their own personal use and whether that would violate the laws that then existed with respect to the limits on production.
And the Supreme Court said, in that case, that in fact you are entering into interstate commerce by producing, even in that situation, for your own consumption. Here, you're not doing anything. Here, you're being told by the government you must enter into this and your failure to enter into it is evidence of the fact that you're involved in interstate commerce.
RAZ: I mean, your argument is that, of course, that Americans should have the right to decide whether or not they want to have health care, right?
Rep. LUNGREN: Oh, absolutely. Look, if the federal government can tell you to do this now, why can they not say that we have an epidemic of obesity in this country, and therefore, as a condition of remaining a citizen or being in this country legally, you must join an approved health center program that is identified specifically by the federal government as being acceptable?
What's the difference essentially if they can require you to purchase this particular product in these certain circumstances? I don't know another circumstance where in the federal government has obligated you to go out and purchase something that you otherwise may not want to purchase.
RAZ: But the question I have for you is the argument made by supporters of the bill, which they would argue that, look, if you don't have some kind of mandate, those people end up in emergency rooms. Oftentimes, they don't pay and those costs are then passed on to people like you and me who do have health insurance and do pay premiums, so we ended up footing a large part of that bill.
Rep. LUNGREN: Well, that's a different question. That's the question of how you provide health care to people. That's not a question of whether the Constitution allows you to answer that specific inquiry in this particular way.
You know, when you really get down to it, I have never seen something as clear-cut as this instance of requiring under penalty of a fine that you purchase a product produced by a non-governmental entity. It's an extraordinary reach. And once you start to analyze what it is you were actually talking about.
RAZ: That's Dan Lungren. He is a Republican congressman from California and the former attorney general in that state. He argues that the individual mandate in the health care law is unconstitutional.
Congressman Lungren, thank you so much.
Rep. LUNGREN: Thanks very much.
RAZ: So, is it as clear-cut as Dan Lungren argues? Well, no, according to many constitutional law experts, including Andrew Koppelman, who teaches law at Northwestern University.
Professor ANDREW KOPPELMAN (Law and Political Science, Northwestern University): One of the remarkable things about this whole argument is that constitutional theories that a couple of years ago everyone would have agreed were wrong have gotten resuscitated. And so you have a wide group of people stating things that's been settled for decades aren't the case and folks in unison are saying them, that doesn't make them true.
I notice that Representative Lungren was very careful not to mention the necessary improper clause of the Constitution. After the Constitution enumerates the powers of Congress, that it can regulate commerce among the several states. It has the power to collect taxes to provide for the general welfare, and then the list of congressional powers ends with an authorization to make all laws, which shall be necessary and proper to carry out its responsibilities.
The necessary improper provision means that in order to carry out its responsibilities, Congress can do things that are not among the enumerated powers. So when somebody goes without health insurance, you know, we can argue about whether they are or not part of interstate commerce. But it doesn't matter. It's necessary to carry out where Congress does have the power to do.
The basic idea of the mandate was that unless you require people to buy health insurance, and since people with preexisting conditions are protected and allowed to buy insurance, healthy people can wait until they get sick to buy insurance and that would bankrupt the whole health insurance system because nobody would be paying into the pools. So the only way to protect people with preexisting conditions is to force healthy people into the system.
RAZ: But if the federal government can require all of us to have insurance and for those who don't have insurance to buy it, why wouldn't it be able to then pass a whole series of other requirements that would force Americans to engage in other commercial activity?
Prof. KOPPELMAN: Well, Congress has authority and authority can be abused. Congress has the taxing authority, and that means that Congress could, if it wanted to, impose a 100 percent tax on all incomes, which would destroy the American economy. I don't think they're going to do it. I don't think we have to be worried about it.
Congress is only going to do this if they have to. I mean, this is quite unusual for Congress to require people to do something. So the idea that we are on a slippery slope to Congress forcing you to do all kinds of things you don't want to do just misunderstands political reality.
RAZ: That's Andrew Koppelman. He teaches law and political science at Northwestern University.
Professor Koppelman, thank you.
Prof. KOPPELMAN: Very happy to be here.
RAZ: Now it turns out that Congress already passed a sort of individual mandate and it happened in 1798. It was called an Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. And President John Adams signed it into law.
Adam Rothman, a history professor at Georgetown, explains.
Professor ADAM ROTHMAN (History, Georgetown University): In the early United States, sailors are an extremely important part of the workforce. Foreign trade and coastal trade is an enormous part of the national economy. At the same time, it's a dangerous world. Sailors are being impressed into the British navy. They're also vulnerable to all sorts of diseases. So to maintain the vitality, the health of that workforce and the national economy, Congress feels that it has to step in.
So in 1798, Congress passes a law that essentially establishes a national health care system funded by the sailors themselves. The sailors pay a tax to the federal government. The federal government uses that money to set up marine hospitals around the country specifically for sailors.
RAZ: That's Adam Rothman. He teaches history at Georgetown University. You can read more about the law at our website, npr.org.
GUY RAZ, host:
If you read any account of why the Roman Empire fell, you'll likely to come across stories of barbarian invasions, political intrigue, even economic collapse.
But add one more to the mix: climate change. That's what a new study published in the journal Science suggests. It was written by a team from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. They analyze tree rings on pieces of ancient wood and scoured peat bogs and old Roman ruins.
Michael Mann is a professor of meteorology at Penn State University and he joins me now to explain this new research.
Welcome.
Professor MICHAEL MANN (Meteorology, Pennsylvania State University): Great to be here.
RAZ: We are talking about the period from 250 to about 550 A.D. These are the final centuries of Roman imperial dominance. Describe what was happening with respect to the climate.
Prof. MANN: Well, at the end of the period, it appears that the climate began to become more variable. Rainfall patterns and temperature patterns fluctuated more from year to year and from decade to decade. And the authors argue that that presented some real challenges for a civilization and may have had a substantial role in the downfall of the Roman Empire.
RAZ: This study went back 2,500 years. One of the ways they did this was to look at tree rings, right? I mean, they had about 9,000 samples. They looked at peat bogs and ruins. And I guess in years where the weather is good, the tree rings are bigger, and when the weather is bad, the rings are smaller. Is that about right?
Prof. MANN: Exactly. And so they were able to tease out two different pieces of information from these trees. They can get some idea of how warm the summers were and how wet the sort of late spring, early summer was.
RAZ: So, for example, would it be cold and wet, rainy one year and then really hot the next year? Was it that dramatic?
Prof. MANN: I think that's basically the conclusion that they're drawing.
RAZ: You're a meteorologist, and the scientists who worked on this are also not historians. But you have a basic understanding of what was happening on the ground at the time. I mean, what are some of the theories for how the fluctuations in the climate could have contributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire?
Prof. MANN: Well, you know, the Roman Empire was a large empire. And like any large civilization, including the civilization we have today, it was highly dependent on predictability of natural resources; the predictability of water supply, the predictability of food resources. It was very heavily adapted to the climate conditions that had persisted for centuries.
So whenever you have unpredictable and dramatic changes in climate, you're likely to see challenges such as those that led presumably to the fall of the Roman Empire.
RAZ: Michael Mann, do we know why this was happening? I mean, this is long before industrialization. So presumably, can we rule out human interference?
Prof. MANN: Well, there are a number of factors that we know are responsible for natural variability of the climate. The amount of energy put out by the sun varies from decade to decade and century to century enough to cause some degree of climate variability. We also know a volcanic eruption can cool the global climate for several years.
And so presumably, it was some combination of these external natural factors like solar variability and volcanic eruptions and just the pure sort of chaotic internal variability of the climate system like we see today. Right now, we are experiencing a very substantial La Nina event...
RAZ: Right.
Prof. MANN: ...in the tropical Pacific, and that's influencing weather patterns around the globe. That's a natural phenomenon. El Nino and La Nina come and go naturally.
So these are the sorts of concerns that would have played out in the past and are playing out today as we proceed with this uncontrolled experiment of changing our climate.
RAZ: That's Michael Mann. He's a professor of meteorology at Penn State University and the author of the book "Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming."
Michael Mann, thank you.
Prof. MANN: Thank you. It's my pleasure.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
President BARACK OBAMA: The past two years were about pulling our economy back from the brink. Our job now is putting our economy into overdrive, to ensure that businesses can take root and folks can find good jobs and America is leading the global competition that will determine our success in the 21st century.
RAZ: That's President Obama speaking in Schenectady, New York, yesterday where he introduced GE chairman Jeff Immelt as the new economic adviser.
James Fallows from The Atlantic is with me now as he is most Saturdays.
Jim, hi.
Mr. JAMES FALLOWS (National Correspondent, The Atlantic): Hello, Guy.
RAZ: All right. So we are just days away now from the State of the Union address. The administration seems to be trying to move away from the perception, Jim - fair or not - that it's been anti-business.
Mr. FALLOWS: Certainly, the administration recognizes that this is the perception even though that fact must drive them crazy, because at the same time, the strongest criticism they face from the left is that the administration has been too cuddling of business, too soft on the financial sector, et cetera.
There is a movement on almost all fronts to the center by the administration. But I think there also is an important substantive issue here. As everyone has said, as we heard in the clip from the president, the issue of the next year or two is the creation of jobs in the United States.
And the administration's strategy partly relies on traditional Democratic stimulus measures like the payroll tax cut, where it's part of the tax deal last year. But also, on the fact that corporations, which are the institutions that create most jobs have now very, very substantial profits but had been slow in increasing their hiring roles once again.
So by bringing Jeffrey Immelt, the head of one of the major manufacturing powers in the world to lead this advisory board, I think the administration is showing that it's attacking this problem in all ways.
RAZ: Switching gears for a moment, Jim, this was, of course, a big week on the U.S.-China front. Of course, the visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao, a lot of symbolism, a lot of platitudes, does it actually change the game a whole lot?
Mr. FALLOWS: In terms of the actual deliverables, as they say, from this meeting, there was not much that was either anticipated or produced from these two days of meetings in Washington.
But I think the symbolism actually mattered in a couple of ways. It was quite significant that the Obama administration really did roll out the entire and literal red carpet treatment for President Hu Jintao. This was seen as a contrast to the 2006 visit that Hu Jintao had made during the Bush administration when instead of a state dinner, he was given a so-called working lunch. All of the pomp and glory of this event was reported very, very widely in China. So that mattered.
I think from the U.S. point of view, the idea was symbolically to convey the U.S. welcomes China's continuing prosperity. It doesn't feel threatened by it. It's not trying to throttle China. This is important in trying to, from the American point of view, avoid a sort of nationalistic reaction within China.
RAZ: And, Jim, I would not be doing my duty as a reporter if I didn't ask you about the state dinner, because you actually went. You didn't have to sneak in. I know you ate rib eye and apple pie, because that was made public. But once the cameras were off, what struck you about it?
Mr. FALLOWS: It was, you know, I wouldn't have been doing my duty as a reporter if I didn't go. And it was really, to be honest, a really exciting and thrilling event to go to.
RAZ: And I should mention that this was not open to the press, only a handful of people were invited.
Mr. FALLOWS: There were four or five journalists who attended and there was no sort of stricture on what you could say. And so it wasn't close in any sense and indeed everybody had to go through a gamut of reporters on the way in.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLOWS: I could tell that when I walked by, nobody took a picture. It was the, oh, it's nobody moment.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. FALLOWS: I think among the many things I saw and I've tried to write a little about on The Atlantic's site, one of the things that probably was most impressive was the entire range of American presence that was there.
You had all three living Democratic former presidents there, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. You didn't have either of the former Bush presidents there, but all the other Republican luminaries that had been involved in developing this relationship were present or represented. Henry Kissinger was there, George Shultz, who was one of the Reagan secretary of State, a number of others too, people from the business community, you had the director of Human Rights Watch who was there too.
So you had a sense that America in its varied aspects were showing the importance of this relationship. And it made it all the stranger and small-minded in retrospect that neither Majority Leader Harry Reid nor Speaker of the House John Boehner felt that he was able to attend.
RAZ: I bet the food wasn't so bad either, right?
Mr. FALLOWS: It wasn't half bad, but I didn't go for the eats.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: That's James Fallows. He's national correspondent for The Atlantic. He's with us most Saturdays.
Jim, thank you.
Mr. FALLOWS: Thank you, Guy.
GUY RAZ, host:
In Greece, the government passed a law last week that's supposed to help clear an enormous backlog of political asylum cases. Thousands of asylum seekers have been waiting there for years of living in limbo and often in poverty. They're also facing rising anti-immigrant violence as the country's economy worsens.
Joanna Kakissis has our story from Athens.
(Soundbite of music)
JOANNA KAKISSIS: Here is a scene Athenians have become familiar with, about a hundred Afghanis camped outside the Neoclassical University in central Athens before Christmas. It was, they said, an act of desperation.
They'd all applied for political asylum in Greece as refugees fleeing war. Years later, they are still waiting for answers, says one of the Afghanis, Esmeray Ahmadi.
Mr. ESMERAY AHMADI: We have lived so long time in here. And we didn't have any problem to stay in here, but the most problem is getting legal document to live like human and without stress.
KAKISSIS: Greece has a backlog of more than 50,000 asylum applications. Less than 1 percent are granted. Applications are usually ignored unless something terrible happens, and the local media happens to pick up on it.
Last March, an Afghani family got asylum after a bomb in a dumpster blew up their son and blinded their daughter. In November, 12 Iranians sewed their mouths shut in protest and also got asylum.
But in most cases, asylum seekers are invisible, says Kalliopi Stefanaki. She's the protection officer for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Athens.
Ms. KALLIOPI STEFANAKI (Protection Officer, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees): They are very frustrated. They don't trust the system and the authorities. And they have right. They have been in a limbo situation for years. They are facing also an increase in xenophobia and racism. They have become desperate.
KAKISSIS: The government says it recognizes the problem. Deputy Labor Minister Anna Dalara says the new law will streamline the application procedure and give asylum seekers firm dates for hearings.
Ms. ANNA DALARA (Deputy Labor Minister): From now on, asylum petitions will be dealt with swiftly and efficiently but, most importantly, under the humanitarian rules. It's crucial that we solve this problem.
KAKISSIS: Dalara says the problem also lies with the European Union. Thanks to what's known as the Dublin II agreement, member countries are allowed to send back asylum seekers to the first EU country they entered. And for most undocumented migrants these days, that's Greece.
Unidentified Man: (Singing in foreign language)
KAKISSIS: Many migrants live in a central Athens neighborhood called Aghios Panteleimonas. It's named after a Greek Orthodox cathedral that towers in the main square.
The deputy labor minister's husband, the popular Greek singer George Dalara, recently led a concert there to show support for refugees. Inside, the church was packed.
(Soundbite of protest)
KAKISSIS: But outside, a group of angry Greek men protested. They sang the national anthem and waved Greek flags. They claimed the government supports migrants, not Greeks.
Local resident Dimitris Pipikios says he understands. He grew up in the neighborhood and says it's gone to hell now. He blames the migrants.
Mr. DIMITRIS PIPIKIOS: (Foreign language spoken)
KAKISSIS: I see Afghani men gang up on an old Greek guy so they can steal a hundred euros, he says.
That rising anti-immigrant anger helped a violent far-right group called Chrysi Avgi win a seat to the Athens municipal council in November. Gangs supporting the group often attack migrants in Aghios Panteleimonas.
That's what happened to Qadir Hossaini, an Afghani who has lived here for eight years. On a recent night outside the church, he says a gang of Greek men beat him until he blacked out.
Mr. QADIR HOSSAINI: Even during the day, I cannot go there, because the place that it happened this thing for me, I'm afraid.
KAKISSIS: And many migrants are not optimistic that the new law will change anything. The protest outside the Athens University continues. The Afghani asylum seekers have started a hunger strike. Six have sewn their lips shut in a demand for immediate action.
For NPR News, I'm Joanna Kakissis in Athens.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
GUY RAZ, host:
You have just over 24 hours to submit your original short story in Round Six of our Three-Minute Fiction writing contest here on Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Our judge, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, says each story has to include one character who tells a joke and one who cries.
BOB MONDELLO: (Reading) I remember when I first saw you, I said. So beautiful. I sat like the most shameless voyeur and watched you eat a bowl of soup for 10 minutes trying my best to think of the line that might get your attention, even make you laugh. Do you remember? Yes, she admitted, voice lacking the flavor of nostalgia, I do. She flipped the lid of the suitcase, zipped it all the way around and tugged it twice to make sure it was tightly closed, looked at me then and showed the briefest crinkle of her brow.
And then, I said - she broke in - waiter, what's this fly doing in my soup? And the waiter said - I began, she finished - the backstroke. We both laughed as we'd laughed then at the familiar thing that was once new and meaningful, beautiful in its infancy but now gnarled and gray. She picked up the suitcase. I didn't offer to help.
SUSAN STAMBERG: (Reading) Did I ever tell you the one about the rope that went in the bar, he asked. I had heard it countless times, but I smiled and nodded noncommittally. He took my gesture as a reason to continue. See, the rope goes in and the bartender tells him to scram. He don't serve their kind. So the rope goes out, puts a loop in himself and unravels his end and goes back in the bar. Bartender says, ain't you the rope I just told to get out? And the rope says, I'm afraid not.
The unlit cigarette dangled from his lips shaking and almost falling as the old man laughed and struggled to find his breath. I smiled until the spasms went on longer than I liked, and I looked over at him.
MIKE PESCA: (Reading) Vince sat on dad's bed and talked to him as if he could hear everything. Dad hadn't uttered a word in days. The nurse would come in and turn him and the party would resume upon her departure. Cat poured the wine. Always the wild woman, she was more gentle this evening. We were all trying to one-up the other with our stories. Vin, the consummate prankster, decided to tell a joke.
Hey, I have one: What is dad's favorite drink? But we never got to hear the answer to Vin's joke. Out of nowhere, we heard a gentle murmur: Becks. Not believing our ears, Vin said, what? Again, dad breathed: Becks.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Excerpts from the stories by Lamar Jones of Wilmington, Delaware, Benjamin Tosh(ph) of Wasilla, Alaska and Isabelle Hart(ph) in Naples, Florida. Thanks to our readers, NPR's Bob Mondello, Susan Stamberg and Mike Pesca.
And now, it's your turn. To submit your story, go to our website at npr.org/threeminutefiction, all spelled out, no spaces.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
Long before the Tiger Mom phenomenon, a man named Boris Sidis was touting his child-rearing methods back around 1910. His son was William James Sidis. And to those who knew of him, he was quite possibly the smartest man who ever lived.
A few months ago, an inscribed copy of a book Sidis wrote, called "The Animate and the Inanimate," was sold in London to an anonymous collector for almost $8,000. The book is about the existence of black holes. It was written more than half a century before Stephen Hawking wrote about the same topic.
Now, back in 1937, The New Yorker magazine tracked Sidis down and wrote an account of his life.
LIANE HANSEN: One snowy January evening in 1910, about a hundred professors and advanced students of mathematics from Harvard University gathered in a lecture hall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to listen to a speaker by the name of William James Sidis.
(Soundbite of music)
HANSEN: He had never addressed an audience before, and he was abashed and a little awkward at the start. His listeners had to attend closely, for he spoke in a small voice that did not carry well. The speaker wore black velvet knickers. He was 11 years old.
Ms. AMY WALLACE (Biographer): Probably, his voice hadn't changed, and they were agog.
RAZ: That's Amy Wallace. She wrote a biography about that speaker, William James Sidis. He was presenting a paper called "Four-Dimensional Bodies," explaining complex shapes and concepts most of the audience had never even heard of.
Ms. WALLACE: He staggered the scientific community of Harvard.
RAZ: So how did 11-year-old William James Sidis end up lecturing to Harvard's brightest minds? Amy Wallace says it was probably a combination of nature and nurture.
Ms. WALLACE: Well, they say he has the highest IQ ever.
RAZ: It was thought to be a hundred points higher than Einstein's. Sidis' parents were pretty smart too. His dad, Boris Sidis, was a famous psychologist. His mom was a doctor.
Ms. WALLACE: They believed that you could make a genius.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: His mom put books and maps and even a little globe in his nursery. By the time he was 18 months, he could read The New York Times.
Ms. WALLACE: At 4, he was speaking Latin. He was writing a novel. He wrote poetry in French. He wrote a constitution for a utopia, invented his own language.
So one thing that was very unusual about William compared to other child prodigies, very few prodigies have multiple abilities like this.
RAZ: And by the time he was 9?
Ms. WALLACE: By the time he was 9, he was ready for Harvard.
RAZ: But Harvard wanted Sidis to wait until he was 11, which is when he was first unveiled at that Harvard lecture. Five years later, he graduated cum laude at the age of 16.
But during his time at school, Sidis came to despise the attention he got as one of the youngest students in Harvard's history.
Ms. WALLACE: He admitted that he'd never kissed a girl. And he was teased and chased. All he wanted was to get away from academia, be a regular working man.
RAZ: So Sidis went into hiding. He moved from city to city, job to job, often using an alias. But all the while, he wrote.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: He wrote a 1,200-page book on the history of the United States. He wrote a book on streetcar transfer tickets, which he loved to collect, and he published his books under at least eight pseudonyms.
Ms. WALLACE: We probably will never know how many books he published under false names.
RAZ: Sidis lived pretty successfully out of the limelight until that article in 1937.
Ms. WALLACE: Finally, when he was 44 years old...
RAZ: He was befriended by a woman in Boston.
Ms. WALLACE: He invited her for a cup of coffee in his apartment, and she queried him about his life.
RAZ: But the woman was sent there by The New Yorker for a profile. It was the same article that described Sidis' Harvard lecture.
HANSEN: (Reading) William James Sidis lives today in a hall bedroom of Boston's shabby South End.
Ms. WALLACE: And it was humiliating. They made fun of him. They made him sound crazy. They accused him of having a nervous breakdown, which he never had. And Sidis decided to come out of the woodwork and out of hiding and sued The New Yorker.
RAZ: He sued The New Yorker for libel, and he won. But after the victory...
Ms. WALLACE: Almost immediately after, that incredible brain exploded. He had a brain hemorrhage, and he died.
RAZ: At the age of 46, William James Sidis died. His many books were never widely published, at least not under his real name. It's the reason many people today have never even heard of him.
Do you think that, were he alive today, he would be diagnosed with a social disorder?
Ms. WALLACE: Well, Sidis would have probably been referred to as having what's known as Asperger's syndrome: very bright about your field but kind of rigid socially. And people who knew him adored him. He was a fantastic friend, a mensch and a wonderful guy. So, you know, I think he really went from being completely traumatized as a young boy to becoming a happy man.
RAZ: That's Amy Wallace. She's a biographer of child prodigy William James Sidis. She spoke to us from her home in Los Angeles.
GUY RAZ, host:
February 6th will mark a hundred years since the birth of one of the most popular presidents in American history, Ronald Reagan. His story has been told by several biographers but none quite in the way that his son, Ron, tells it.
Ron Reagan's written a new memoir about his dad and their relationship. It's called "My Father at 100."
Mr. RON REAGAN (Author, "My Father at 100"): It wasn't that I had in mind some particular thing that I wanted to say about him that I felt other people hadn't said. What I was really looking for was keys to his character and personality, particularly the inner character, the metaphorical 10 percent that I talk about in the book that he rarely let anybody see, even his own family, even his own wife.
The keys to that character would be found in his early life. And so I went hunting around in those early days.
RAZ: What was your dad's relationship like with his past? I mean, you went back to Tampico. You went back to Dixon, Illinois. You drove through that part of the country where he grew up and then left, of course, to Hollywood in his youth. Did he kind of want to put that behind him or re-create it, or did he embrace it?
Mr. REAGAN: Well, all of those things, in a way. He certainly embraced it. He did like to, as I point out in the book, in some instances, he does a little script editing. You know, he will relate stories from his past, but he will eliminate uncomfortable aspects.
The story of him, when he was on his college football team, pulled into a hotel, there were two black players on the team, and they learn that the black players won't be welcome to stay in the hotel.
Coach says, you know, fine, we'll sleep on the bus. And my father intervenes and convinces him to send his two black friends home with him, and that way the team can sleep in a hotel and be comfortable and the black players won't feel like they're the cause of, you know, us all shivering on a bus all night.
He would not, when he would relate the story to me in later, much later, years, admit that it was Dixon that was the town where this hotel wouldn't take black people...
RAZ: Wow.
Mr. REAGAN: ...and that no other hotel in the town would accept black people.
Now, he refers to racism in his autobiography as these tumors, tumors of racism within the country. Well, that poses a problem for him. Is Dixon a tumor? Is Dixon an ugly aberration in the country, or, on the other hand, is the country - even north, even in the land of Lincoln - systemically racist, which makes it a little tough to see it as a kind of amber-tinged, you know, shining city on a hill? So he was kind of stuck in a Catch-22 there, and, you know, made some editing cuts there to try and paper that over, I think.
RAZ: Ron Reagan, I'm sure you've had a variation of this question over the course of your life, but given that you're so publicly associated with, let's say, progressive politics today...
Mr. REAGAN: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...how do you sort of deal or respond to questions about the fact that you are the son of this conservative icon, I mean, the most important, arguably, conservative icon?
Mr. REAGAN: Well, you see him as a conservative icon. Of course, I see him as my father. And most people see him as the former president of the United States, which, of course, I grant you, I recognize also. But to me, he's my father.
And fathers and sons, parents and children have been arguing over politics and disagreeing over politics for as long as there have been parents, children and politics.
RAZ: Did you ever upset him with sort of being frank about your views on an issue?
Mr. REAGAN: He was difficult to upset.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. REAGAN: And he certainly wasn't - he didn't get upset just because you happened to disagree with him. Now, he did think that if he could get you alone for five or 10 minutes that he could convince you of his point of view.
I imagine he found it a bit frustrating that, over the years, that didn't seem to work with me all the time. But that wasn't something that I was going to particularly, you know, bother about in the book.
I did not want this book to be a political book. I wasn't out to settle scores with him in any way. I, you know, I argued with him plenty when he was alive, and we could do it face to face. I had no intention of picking a fight with him that he...
RAZ: I mean, you...
Mr. REAGAN: ...where he wouldn't be able to defend himself.
RAZ: You intersperse bits of your dad's biography with recollections of your relationship with him. And at one point, he said to you, and I love this quote, he said: You're my son, so I have to love you. But sometimes, you make it very hard to like you.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. REAGAN: Yeah. Yes.
RAZ: Did you remember what he was responding to?
Mr. REAGAN: I don't remember exactly what it was, no. I mean, we would get -you know, of course we'd have difficulties. I was a teenager at that time. I was probably 16, 17 years old.
RAZ: You grew your hair long, and you were the son of Ronald Reagan.
Mr. REAGAN: Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. I - you know, I wore thrift store clothes and military surplus, was against the Vietnam War, and I was an atheist and, you know, all sorts - listened to music that he couldn't understand, and you know, strange smells would emerge from my bedroom occasionally and all that sort of thing.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. REAGAN: So, you know, yeah, he wasn't happy about that. But again, that's, I think, a sentiment that a lot of parents may feel about their teenage children. You know, the teenage years can be a bit rocky.
RAZ: I'm curious to know what you make of the sort of veneration of Ronald Reagan. You call it a fetish in the book. And I want to play a clip of some of what that might sound like.
Mr. REAGAN: Okay. All right.
Unidentified Man #1: Who was your favorite Republican president?
Unidentified Man #2: Ronald Reagan.
Unidentified Man #3: Reagan.
Unidentified Man #4: Reagan.
Unidentified Man #5: Reagan.
Unidentified Man #6: Reagan.
Unidentified Man #7: Reagan. He brought me into the Republican Party.
Senator JOHN McCAIN (Republican, Arizona): I'm proud to have been a member of the Reagan Revolution.
Unidentified Man #7: The Reagan principles.
Unidentified Man #8: Aside from President Reagan, who is your political hero?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Man #9: That's a trick question, hang on.
RAZ: Everybody loves Ronald Reagan.
Mr. REAGAN: Everybody loves Ronald Reagan.
RAZ: I mean - does it make you uncomfortable, or do you sort of distance yourself from that?
Mr. REAGAN: Oh, it doesn't make me uncomfortable. I understand it. I mean, if you're a Republican candidate for president, or any other office for that matter, who are you going to venerate in the Republican Party, George W. Bush? No, I don't think so. H.W. Bush? Eh, not so inspiring. Nixon? No, that's not going to work for you. You know, Ronald Reagan's pretty much it. So yes...
RAZ: But nonetheless, you call it a fetish.
Mr. REAGAN: Well, I think as you just demonstrated, it becomes so reflexive and so almost fetishistic that really, he's like the rubber bustier of the Republican Party. I mean, they're so all over him.
RAZ: Ron Reagan, in many ways, this book that you've written seems to be about a son getting to know a part of his father that he really didn't know...
Mr. REAGAN: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...you know, the Ronald Reagan behind the Edmund Morris biography "Dutch."
Mr. REAGAN: And, by the way, it's much easier to write a history of your father if Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers have paved the way for you and left just reams of footnotes for you to go through.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: At the end of your journey, what did you discover about your dad that maybe changed the way you think about him or surprised you?
Mr. REAGAN: I don't think there were any huge surprises or things that fundamentally changed the way I thought about him. But it is true that I have a new and, I hope, deeper appreciation for the solitary, undersized little boy that he was, who spent a lot of time by himself, you know, poring over books and strange artifacts, some of them from the West, which, you know, filled his head with visions of this wide open frontier and this broad landscape in which he could be a hero, the guy who saves the day. I think I have a better appreciation of that.
RAZ: That's Ron Reagan. He's the son of the late president Ronald Reagan. His new book is called "My Father at 100." It's in bookstores now.
Ron Reagan, thank you so much for joining us.
Mr. REAGAN: Well, Guy, thanks for having me.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
The film "Slumdog Millionaire" was the first time many people outside India got a sense of what life is like for millions of street kids in that country. Now, a group in New Delhi is tapping into the tourism industry to try and expose more people to the harsh realities of that world. It offers a tour conducted by street kids on their own turf.
NPR's Corey Flintoff went along.
COREY FLINTOFF: Satender Sharma is shepherding about a dozen tourists into the maze of alleyways that surrounds the New Delhi railway station.
Mr. SATENDER SHARMA: In this walk, I will tell you more about the street life, how children comes on the street, what they are doing.
FLINTOFF: It's an unlikely tourist destination: noisy, smoky, smelly, crowded and chaotic. Satender is an unlikely tour guide. He ran away from home at the age of 11 to escape an abusive father.
Mr. SHARMA: My father used to beated up all our family. One day, he beated my mom very badly, and he killed her.
FLINTOFF: Satender stowed away aboard a train and ended up, alone and penniless, at a railway station in New Delhi.
Unidentified Woman: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: Children in India's railway stations face predators of all kinds, but Satender learned that kids can live by their wits: Boys can make money by begging, picking pockets or scavenging empty bottles to sell.
Satender leads the tour to a small square. It's like a scene from Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist," where boys are selling empty whiskey bottles to a trash dealer. A ragged man is breaking an old sofa into firewood.
Mr. SHARMA: They are doing this kind of job. It will earn him more than 200 rupees every day.
FLINTOFF: Two hundred rupees is about $4.50, a lot of money in a country where about 80 percent of the population lives on less than $2 a day.
But there's a catch. Street children have no place to keep the money they earn where it won't be stolen, by adults, by bigger kids, and sometimes by corrupt police. They have to spend it or lose it every day.
Food isn't a problem. The kids can get free food at a nearby Sikh temple that feeds the homeless, or they can steal it from the railway kitchens.
Mr. SHARMA: There are two mains: drugs and entertainment.
FLINTOFF: The entertainment of choice is movies, where kids can also sleep and avoid the police. They also spend a lot on video games in hole-in-the-wall arcades.
The drugs of choice are glue and typewriter correction fluid. Satender explains that kids who do inhalants are usually dead before they reach their late teens.
The fate of girls on the streets is even grimmer than that of boys. Almost all are scooped up by brokers who sell them into prostitution.
Satender was found by a social worker from a group called the Salaam Baalak Trust. Salaam Baalak means hello, street kid.
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)
FLINTOFF: The group has contact points around the city, like this one next to the New Delhi train station. It's a mini shelter where the kids can come in for a meal and a place to sleep.
A half-dozen grimy boys huddle over a game board. Satender says that for many of these kids, life on the street is better than what they left behind, and it offers them a kind of freedom that's hard to give up.
The counselors here don't try to get the kids to come in off the street until they're ready, says P.N. Mishra, a member of Salaam Baalak's executive board. Some of them opt to go home.
Mr. P.N. MISHRA (Salaam Baalak Trust): And then we are trying to restore them back to their family. Every year, we restore six to 700 children in different part of India.
FLINTOFF: One boy who's waiting to go home has come all the way from Nepal. He's 13-year-old Saras Karo(ph), who says he ran away to escape a bad situation at his father's house.
Mr. SARAS KARO: I ran away from house because I have one stepmother who don't like me. I also don't like her. So I ran away from house. I want to go with my own mother with little (unintelligible).
FLINTOFF: Counselors say they're trying to find an address for the boy's mother so they can send him to her. Kids who can't or won't go home can move into one of Salaam Baalak's shelters.
Satender leads his tour upstairs to the community center where he spent six months before he trusted the counselors enough to tell them where he came from.
Today is TV day, and about two dozen boys huddle like puppies under blankets while they watch cartoons. Mishra says the kids can get some schooling here and medical attention as well. When they're ready for the next step, they can go to one of Salaam Baalak's five homes, two for girls and three for boys.
The tour ends here. Very few tourists who take the walk seem to find it a depressing experience. Most, like American Catherine Farnsworth, say they were heartened by the kids' resilience and spirit.
Ms. CATHERINE FARNSWORTH: There's no shame involved or anything. They're just telling their stories and living their lives and - yeah.
FLINTOFF: Mishra says the idea for the tour came from a British volunteer who worked at the shelter two years ago. The volunteer conceived of the tours as a way for the older kids to improve their English and gain confidence in dealing with people.
But Mishra says it has helped sensitize visitors, foreign and Indian alike, to the problems of street children.
Mr. MISHRA: So this is a very important program, and this program is running, too, with the help of our older kids.
FLINTOFF: He says street kids who've taken part in the trust's programs have gone on to a variety of jobs, ranging from highway toll collectors to engineers, and they include a Bollywood movie actor and an internationally known photographer. You might meet them anywhere, he says.
Corey Flintoff, NPR News, New Delhi.
GUY RAZ, host:
From NPR News, this is WEEKENDS ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
Unidentified Man: Mr. Speaker, the president of the United States.
(Soundbite of applause)
RAZ: Tuesday night, President Obama delivers his second State of the Union address before Congress. Our cover story this Sunday is in three parts: What the president will say, what some policy experts hope he says, and how the Republicans plan to respond.
First to the what. And for that, we turn to Peter Baker, White House correspondent for The New York Times.
Peter, welcome.
Mr. PETER BAKER (White House Correspondent, The New York Times): Thanks for having me.
RAZ: In recent months, as you know, the president has likened our current situation to a new Sputnik age, a sort of a turning point where America will have to confront a whole series of consequential challenges. Is that the theme he's likely to strike on Tuesday night?
Mr. BAKER: I think you'll hear a lot of that idea, the idea of making America competitive again in the world, that the risk of falling behind our competitors, like China and India in particular, is too great not to find ways of improving America's posture.
And that includes a lot of different things that President Obama considers to be priorities, not just trade, which is an obvious one, but things like education, how to get our workforce better trained, research, innovation, infrastructure, high-speed trains, that kind of thing.
RAZ: Are you going to be looking for clues in what the president is expected to say? In Bill Clinton's 1995 State of the Union, a similar situation, he had to face a newly elected Republican House of Representatives. I mean, do you think that will sort of give us a sense of where President Obama might be headed, at least with his rhetoric?
Mr. BAKER: I think we will. I think we've begun to see, in small ways, anyway, a more - a repositioning of where he is at. That's not to say he's given up on the things he really cares about. He's still going to defend the health care overhaul against Republican efforts to repeal it. He's still going to defend things he did in terms of stimulus, financial regulation and so forth.
But you hear him talking more about trade, which wasn't a big theme in his first year, for instance. You hear him this week appointing a new competitiveness council, headed by Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of GE, reaching out to the business community in different ways.
RAZ: He's got Bill Daley as a new chief of staff and Jacob Lew, these sort of pro-business guys around him now.
Mr. BAKER: Exactly. And he promised to look at regulations that hobbled job creation. So you're hearing a little bit of a recognition that he needs to work out a new relationship with business. (Unintelligible)...
RAZ: There is this perception, of course, that he is - his administration...
Mr. BAKER: Right.
RAZ: ...has been anti-business.
Mr. BAKER: Right.
RAZ: And do you think this speech will be an effort to kind of mend those ties?
Mr. BAKER: I do think that's part of it, absolutely. He's going to say, look, this is too important for all of us to fracture over old lines of pro and anti-business.
RAZ: Peter, you have covered Washington for a long time. You've seen these moments nearly every January, when the president goes to address Congress. How much does it set the tone for the year ahead?
Mr. BAKER: I think it does set a tone. The State of the Union is important because it's an organizing document for a presidency. It's not just a speech he writes a couple of days in advance. It's something that goes to a process over weeks and weeks, leading up to a speech in which the whole of government comes together and say, what are we going to make our priority?
So what gets in the State of the Union and what doesn't get in the State of the Union is really a proxy fight for what the whole year is going to be about for an administration.
RAZ: All right. Peter, we know you are well-connected. You've got deep sources. Give us some surprises. Any surprises?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. BAKER: Well, I think if we - if I knew them, they wouldn't be surprises. I would - I think an interesting parlor game on Tuesday night will be to count the number of times you hear the word jobs and hear the - with the word competitiveness. What you probably won't hear, for instance, would be words like Iraq, Afghanistan.
And you'll get to see the applause lines. What is, you know, the applause line? Part of what happened in 2010 was he came right off the election of Scott Brown in Massachusetts, and he basically came back and said, I don't give up easily. Don't think you're going to roll me. This time around, having had a relatively successful lame-duck session, the imperative is a little different.
I think he has to find a way of asserting his strength but also making himself look reasonable to the broader public so that if there are fights to come, he looks like the good guy, and the other guys don't.
RAZ: That's Peter Baker. He's a White House correspondent for The New York Times.
Peter, thanks so much for coming in.
Mr. BAKER: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
RAZ: Now imagine if you could give that speech. Well, we asked three top policy experts to deliver their own dream version of the State of the Union. We'll hear from Maya MacGuineas. She is the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation; also from Bruce Bartlett, a former domestic policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan; and Heather Hurlburt, a former special assistant to President Bill Clinton, who's now with the National Security Network. We begin with Maya MacGuineas.
Ms. MAYA MacGUINEAS (President, Committee for a Responsible Budget, New America Foundation): We all know that our deficits are too large. We cannot continue to borrow beyond our means without facing dire economic consequences. For the past few years, my primary focus has had to be on fixing the economy, and though we're not out of the woods yet, we must now turn our attention to getting our nation's fiscal house in order.
Controlling the debt affects everything I and we all care about, including providing our children a first-rate education, investing in the technologies of the future, protecting the most vulnerable and building a competitive business environment. Every one of those national priorities is at risk until we right our fiscal ship. If we lose control of our debt, we lose control of our destiny.
So tonight, I invite the leadership from the House and the Senate to join me for a budget retreat, where we will work until we come up with a bipartisan plan to bring down the debt. This will not be easy. But we must put behind us finger pointing and political posturing and solve this problem. I will not consider my work complete until we pass a plan to do so.
RAZ: That's Maya MacGuineas. Now to former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett.
Mr. BRUCE BARTLETT (Columnist, The Fiscal Times): There is almost universal agreement that the tax code is a mess. It is cluttered with a vast number of special tax provisions that benefit neither the economy, society nor the Treasury. Worse, these provisions, called tax expenditures, may even hinder growth by encouraging individuals and businesses to invest their time and money inefficiently.
Economic decisions ought to be based on fundamentals, not because the tax code provides a subsidy for doing one thing rather than another. It is clear that one reform will have to be a reduction in tax rates on American businesses, which are handicapped by one of the higher corporate tax rates among major countries. But this must not be the beginning and end of tax reform.
Cleaning up the code and getting rid of special deals for particular businesses and industries is just as important as cutting rates. Furthermore, the package must be balanced. We can't afford another big tax cut, and any tax bill that is not paid for will meet my veto pen.
RAZ: Former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett. And finally to former Clinton adviser Heather Hurlburt.
Ms. HEATHER HURLBURT (Executive Director, National Security Network): My fellow Americans, as president, I hear every day from the most respected, least partisan institution in our national life: the U.S. military. Our men and women in uniform are asking for civilian leadership that goes beyond bickering.
You might be surprised, and we can all be inspired, by what they have to say about the core issues we face, like clean energy, debt reduction and economic competitiveness.
The military is asking us not to wait to make investments in clean energy and green jobs. So the Pentagon isn't waiting: It's researching next-generation fuels, putting wind farms on Army bases and solar arrays on Air Force hangars. Surely we, in Washington, can do the same.
RAZ: Heather Hurlburt speaking, and before, we heard from Bruce Bartlett and Maya MacGuineas.
Now, Republicans in Congress plan to launch a debate on spending the very day President Obama is set to deliver his speech. Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan is spearheading that conversation.
Congressman Jordan, welcome to the program.
Representative JIM JORDAN (Republican, Ohio): Good to be with you.
RAZ: You're proposing cuts that, over the next 10 years, you say could amount to about $2.5 trillion in savings. I wonder why you think your plan is better or more substantial than the plan put forward by the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles Commission back in December. That proposal would cut four trillion over that same period.
Rep. JORDAN: Well, a couple of things. One, theirs has tax increases in it, and we just don't accept the premise that, you know, somehow you need to raise taxes to deal with deficits and debt. Deficits and debt are caused by government spending.
And the other thing that we think is critical is to truly deal with the amount of debt we now have, you've got to have economic growth. And to have economic growth, you can't be raising taxes on the job creators.
RAZ: Congressman Jordan, your plan makes cuts primarily in non-defense discretionary spending.
Rep. JORDAN: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: I counted about 50 programs.
Rep. JORDAN: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: As you know, most deficit hawks, including Ronald Reagan's former budget director David Stockman, who said on this program, he said, you can't cut the budget deficit substantially without going after entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. Are - I mean, are you intentionally sort of skirting around touching those two very sensitive programs?
Rep. JORDAN: No. I said today, Guy - and it's a good question. Does everything need to be on the table? Certainly. We need to look at the entitlements. We need to look at making sure that we protect and save Social Security. And in order to do that, you're going to have to make some changes. We need to make sure we protect and save Medicare. In order to do that, you're going to have to make some changes. So certainly, those need to be a part of a discussion as well.
RAZ: You say changes to entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, but, I mean, let's, you know, talk frankly. I mean, changes is going to mean cuts, some kind of cuts?
Rep. JORDAN: Certainly people at or near retirement age should be able to stay in the exact same system because they've structured and built their lives around that model.
But for younger Americans, we need to begin to make some changes and empower them and their family to do something different that will protect the systems going forward and frankly empower them and their family as they also move to the future.
RAZ: I mean, obviously, many of the programs that are proposed to be cut are pale in size and scope to the large entitlement programs or defense spending. For example, there's a proposal to cut the U.S. Agency for International Development.
This is an agency that many foreign policy experts would argue is the tip of the spear...
Rep. JORDAN: Mm-hmm.
RAZ: ...of America's soft-power diplomacy. These are programs to, you know, educate the world about the good things that the United States does.
I mean, wouldn't the elimination of a program like USAID have some serious national security consequences?
Rep. JORDAN: It may, in fact, have. Guy, who knows? But let's have the debate. Here's the point: The bulk of our savings in this bill comes because we reduce overall spending. We now have to go through and do the hard analysis, program by program, line item by line item, and say, okay, is this wasteful? Is this redundant? Does this program work?
So maybe you're right on that particular program, but I think it's important to include it in the discussion and move forward so that we can get to real savings.
RAZ: The Senate Democrats say this plan probably will never pass the Senate. Where could you see daylight with the other side, with Democrats?
Rep. JORDAN: You know, I don't know - see, I just - people have said the same thing with this, you know, the health care repeal that we did. I mean, I always use the analogy, you know, every Friday night in the fall, we have football games in Ohio and across this country, and many times, there's one team that's heavily favored and all - the underdog. There's no way they can win. They still kick the ball off. They still play the game.
I think we have to do what we told the voters we were going to do, send it over to the next body and see what happens.
RAZ: That's Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, chairman of the Republican Study Committee. That's the Conservative Caucus in the House of Representatives.
Congressman, thank you.
Rep. JORDAN: Thank you, Guy. Take care.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
This is a new piece of music. Some people call it ethereal, multilayered, a soundscape that reminds them of Philip Glass or Stephen Reich. And if you like them, this should appeal to you as well.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: The thing about this piece is that it's the work of an artist somewhat less obscure than the ones I just mentioned. The song is actually called "U Smile," and the artist, it's tween heartthrob Justin Bieber.
(Soundbite of song, "U Smile")
Mr. JUSTIN BIEBER: (Singing) I wait on you forever.
RAZ: Justin Bieber is not responsible for that earlier piece, but they are the same exact song. This song is this song.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: This version is the song slowed down 800 times. And last summer, a producer posted it online, and it became an Internet phenomenon. Thousands, actually millions of people went to hear it. [POST-BROADCAST CORRECTION: This version is the song slowed down eight times, or 800%.]
And it turns out that a lot of producers are starting to do the same thing with other music, including one of our own producers, Brent Baughman, who is in the studio with me to explain why.
Why are they doing this?
BRENT BAUGHMAN: They're doing it because there's this really simple software. It's free. It's easy to use. It's called Paul's Extreme Soundstretch. And it allows anyone to plug in a song and slow it down hundreds, even thousands of times. And online, people go crazy for this stuff.
RAZ: (Unintelligible) discussions.
BAUGHMAN: Yeah. They go crazy for it. And they call it cosmic and ethereal, and they compare it to Brian Eno's early work.
RAZ: His early work, not his later work.
BAUGHMAN: His early work, right. And most recent example of this was this past week, someone took the music from the film "Jurassic Park"....
RAZ: Ah, yes.
(Soundbite of music)
BAUGHMAN: this music right here. And then they took it, and they slowed it down 1,000 times.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: A thousand times. That's amazing. Aaron Copland, right, I'm thinking, like, majestic...
BAUGHMAN: Early Aaron Copland.
RAZ: Of course, early Aaron. So, amazing stuff.
BAUGHMAN: Yeah. And that's what most people online say too.
RAZ: But does this work with any song? Can you plug any song into this program and make it...
BAUGHMAN: That's the thing - yeah, I think it might. Let me give you a few examples. Take a listen to this first one.
RAZ: Okay.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Oh, that's gorgeous, shimmering, that kind of buildup.
BAUGHMAN: Mm-hmm. Any guesses?
RAZ: No idea. Beautiful.
(Soundbite of song, "Just Dance")
LADY GAGA (Singer): (Singing) Just dance. Gonna be okay...
RAZ: Wow. I did not know Lady Gaga had this in her.
BAUGHMAN: She's a talented lady.
RAZ: She is indeed.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BAUGHMAN: People go gaga. Okay. Let's hear another one. This is my favorite stretched song.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Wow. I believe that this is the King's College Cambridge Men's Choir.
BAUGHMAN: You're hearing some church acoustics there?
RAZ: Yeah. Am I right?
BAUGHMAN: No.
(Soundbite of song, "Hey, Soul Sister")
TRAIN (Music Group): (Singing) Hey...
RAZ: Wow.
BAUGHMAN: You're hearing a ukulele, is actually what you're hearing.
RAZ: That is the same song.
BAUGHMAN: Yeah, Train's "Hey, Soul Sister."
RAZ: Train's "Hey, Soul Sister."
BAUGHMAN: Maybe the worst song of the year.
RAZ: In your opinion.
BAUGHMAN: Yeah. Okay, let me play you one more that I've stretched out. Kind of sinister.
RAZ: Yeah. You could imagine this being used in a movie.
BAUGHMAN: Just before the killer strikes.
RAZ: Just before.
BAUGHMAN: And this song was one of the biggest hits in the year 2000.
(Soundbite of song, "Blue")
EIFFEL 65 (Music Group): (Singing) I'm blue da ba dee da ba di...
BAUGHMAN: (Singing) ...da ba di. Da ba dee da ba di.
RAZ: (Singing) I'm blue. Yeah, this song is an awesome song.
BAUGHMAN: It's a really awful song.
RAZ: I - well, okay. We'll disagree on that one. But that's the same song.
BAUGHMAN: That's the same song, a bad song, I'm going to emphasize again.
RAZ: Okay.
BAUGHMAN: But if you start with a really complex song, you hear that there are even more possibilities for this kind of technology. Let's take Beethoven's Ninth, yeah?
RAZ: Okay. Yeah.
BAUGHMAN: Originally, it's a little more than an hour.
RAZ: Right.
BAUGHMAN: But back in 2002, a Norwegian producer created a version of the Ninth Symphony slowed down to last 24 hours.
RAZ: Twenty-four hours.
BAUGHMAN: It's called "9 Beet Stretch."
(Soundbite of song, "9 Beet Stretch")
BAUGHMAN: So this is "9 Beet Stretch." There's an artist in San Francisco named Aaron Ximm. Last year, he hosted a listening event at a warehouse there, and he invited people to come and spend 24 hours listening to this music.
Mr. AARON XIMM (Sound Artist): It's that quality of suspension in the pace of our lives and that rapidity with which we shift from one multitask task to another. To actually stay with something for as long as this technique allows you to do is kind of a novel experience.
RAZ: Twenty-four hours. I hope he served food there.
BAUGHMAN: I didn't ask him that. They did have beanbags, though.
Mr. XIMM: Hearing sound like this gives your brain the opportunity to move into synchrony with it and itself slow down. You realize that you don't have to be in a hurry. You can sort of stay here for a while and take a look around with your ears.
RAZ: I don't know if I'd want to hear it for 24 hours, but it is - I mean, it really is amazing.
BAUGHMAN: What if you had a beanbag?
RAZ: Then maybe.
BAUGHMAN: Okay. Let me play you one more.
RAZ: Okay.
BAUGHMAN: This is from an artist you had on the show last week...
RAZ: Right.
BAUGHMAN: ...one of my favorites, a track from the new Decemberists album...
RAZ: Ah, yes.
BAUGHMAN: ...yeah, that I think sounds great at any speed.
RAZ: Right.
BAUGHMAN: But listen to it slowed down about 50 times.
(Soundbite of music)
BAUGHMAN: Recognize that?
RAZ: No. What song is this?
BAUGHMAN: I'm not telling you. But we'll put the answer in our podcast this week...
RAZ: All right.
BAUGHMAN: ...along with a few more slowed-down songs.
RAZ: All right, Brent. Thanks so much.
BAUGHMAN: Sure.
RAZ: And by the way, you can find our podcast at npr.org/weekendatc. We post a new episode on Sunday nights.
(Soundbite of music)
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. JOYCE DiDONATO (Opera Singer): (Singing in foreign language)
GUY RAZ, host:
This is the voice of American opera superstar Joyce DiDonato. She's singing the role of the teenaged composer in Richard Strauss's opera "Ariadne Auf Naxos."
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
RAZ: The character here is a boy, and it's one of the recordings from her new album. It's called "Diva, Divo." And on it, Joyce DiDonato performs 16 male and female roles from some of the most famous operas ever written, including this role, the composer from "Ariadne Auf Naxos."
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
Ms. DiDONATO: He's about 17 or 18 years old, a very young composer, who has just had the world opened up in front of him because he's actually discovered a type of love for the first time.
(Soundbite of music)
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
Ms. DiDONATO: He's one of these sort of geeks that spent his whole life composing, and everything was about music, and all of a sudden, this - and he's writing about love all the time.
And then this young, very flirtatious girl appears in front of him. They have this wonderful duet and wonderful discussion. And for the first time, he sees, in flesh and blood, in living color, all these things that he's been writing about.
What I love about this is you hear the enthusiasm in him, and you hear these sort of wild leaps, which is very masculine.
And so for me, getting into the mindset of that, it's all in the music Richard Strauss has given us.
RAZ: Joyce, I want to ask you, for a moment, about you. In the liner notes on this recording, you write that you didn't actually fall in love with opera at first hearing, that it actually took you a long time. And I was surprised to read that.
Ms. DiDONATO: You know, opera is such a personal thing. I think some people come for the first time and they're moved to tears and their life is changed immediately. Other people, it's more like sort of wine. You sort of develop an appreciation for it as you learn about it more.
My passion was ignited when I stepped on the stage and I actually entered into the world of opera from the inside.
RAZ: And of course, you studied opera. You studied - you are from Kansas City, and you studied at Wichita State University. Were you kind of an oddball growing up?
Ms. DiDONATO: Well, you know, I was a theater kid. And I was the choir geek. And so I entered university to be a music teacher. And I got sidetracked pretty violently.
RAZ: Pretty significantly, yeah. I mean, because you never intended to be an opera singer?
Ms. DiDONATO: I didn't. No. I mean, I loved the stage. When I was little, you know, I dreamed of being on the stage. But I think I was modest enough to say, you know, maybe I could be a backup singer for Billy Joel. That would be really cool.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. DiDONATO: That was first my...
RAZ: Maybe you still can be.
Ms. DiDONATO: Does anybody have his number?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. DiDONATO: I mean, you know, I loved that idea. But I think coming from a very sort of modest background, I don't know that I allowed myself to dream that big.
RAZ: You're hearing the voice of the opera singer Joyce DiDonato. Her new record is called "Diva, Divo."
Obviously, this record, there's a lot of gender-bending. But then there's this other layer here, which is you have two takes on every story. So the same operatic story told by two different composers.
You've got two different versions of "Faust," for example, two different versions of "Cinderella." Why did you do that?
Ms. DiDONATO: Well, it was a way to try and tell stories. You know, one of my favorite elements of the opera world is that it's theatre. And I liked this idea of exploring the same story and learning from two different composers what the musical language that they used to create this.
For example, there's a "Clemence de Titus," "The Clemency of Titus" story. And in one, I sing the young adolescent boy who's in love with the older, manipulative woman. And she has asked him to kill the emperor to prove his love for her. And he's very conflicted, obviously, but he agrees to do it because he loves her so much.
And his piece, by Gluck, is very plangent and has this astonishing oboe solo going over it, and it's poetic and wonderful. And it's very feminine, in a way.
(Soundbite of song, "La Clemence de Titus")
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
Then you have the woman, and she's manipulative, and she's full of vengeance. And she's fabulous, and this is Mozart's world. And he gives her this cutting, angular, almost harsh sort of opening to the piece.
(Soundbite of song, "La Clemence de Titus")
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
And it's actually quite aggressive and what you would think of as masculine. So I found it fascinating to see how the composers viewed these different stories and the different genders in the theater of it.
RAZ: Joyce DiDonato, there's a story about you that just seems unbelievable to me, but perhaps I'll let you tell it, and this is how you once sang an opera with a broken leg.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. DiDONATO: You know, I've actually gone back, and for a while, I put a moratorium on people telling me to break a leg because it did actually happen onstage.
RAZ: Yeah. Did that...
Ms. DiDONATO: But now I'm laughing in the face of fate.
I was - it was opening night of "The Barber of Seville" at Covent Garden, and it was a pretty star-studded cast, and there was a lot of buzz around it. And as Rosina, I have the opening aria of "Una Voce Poco Fa," which I've sung, you know, hundreds and hundreds of times.
And I thought, okay, this went pretty well. I'm feeling pretty good about this. And I took a little jog across the stage in conversation with the Figaro, and I fell.
I ended up getting into a cast and finishing the run of the show in a bright, neon pink cast that matched my costume perfectly, and I wheeled myself around the stage. It was pretty incredible.
(Soundbite of laughter)
RAZ: An amazing story. I know you're performing in "Dead Man Walking" at the Houston Grand Opera right now, and then you've got this very busy schedule of international performances for the rest of the year. So I will not say what people shouldn't say to you.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. DiDONATO: Thank you. I appreciate that.
RAZ: And, Joyce, that role that you performed with your broken leg, Rosina, you also sing it on this album.
Ms. DiDONATO: Yes, I do.
(Soundbite of song, "Una Voce Poco Fa")
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
RAZ: Joyce DiDonato's new recording is called "Diva, Divo." It comes out next Tuesday, but you can hear the entire album at our website, nprmusic.org. And if you're in Houston or in the Houston area, you have until February 6 to see Joyce in the opera "Dead Man Walking" at the Houston Grand Opera.
Joyce DiDonato, thank you so much.
Ms. DiDONATO: Thanks. It was a real pleasure.
(Soundbite of song, "Una Voce Poco Fa")
Ms. DiDONATO: (Singing in foreign language)
RAZ: And for Sunday, that's Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz. You can hear the best of this program on our new podcast, Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Subscribe or listen at iTunes or at npr.org/weekendatc. We'll be back on the radio next weekend. Until then, thanks for listening, and have a great week.
GUY RAZ, host:
The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the bestselling author of "Purple Hibiscus" and "Half of a Yellow Sun," and she's also judging our current round of Three-Minute Fiction here on Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
RAZ: And we're here to remind you that today is the last day to get your stories in this round. We're asking for original short fiction that can be read in under three minutes, so no more than 600 words. But Chimamanda, what's the catch?
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE: Well, Guy, this round, we're all about emotions. So at some point in the story, one of the characters must tell a joke. Also, one of the characters must cry.
RAZ: And to clarify, the joke and crying can be done by the same character or by different characters, as long as both happen in the story. And, as usual, we have to stick to the deadline.
ADICHIE: So you have to get your stories in by 11:59 Eastern Time.
RAZ: That's 11:59 p.m. tonight. Remember, Eastern Time. To read the full rules and to submit your story, go to our website, npr.org/threeminutefiction. That's threeminutefiction all spelled out, no spaces.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
A P: We're joined by the editor of "O," Jonathan Karp, from Simon & Schuster. And so glad to be with you.
JONATHAN KARP: Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you.
: So I'm curious about something. Did the author come to you and say I have this book proposal for what I think is going to be a really interesting presidential novel, but I don't want you to put my name on it, or did you decide to take his or her name off the book for marketing purposes or some other reason?
KARP: It was mutually agreed upon. We had three reasons for publishing this book anonymously. First of all, the author felt that there would be more creative freedom, more of an ability to put it all out there. The second reason is that we didn't want people to approach the book with any kind of preconceptions about the author's ideology. We didn't want to lose half of the Republicans or half of the Democrats, and this is such a partisan environment into which the book is being published. And finally, yeah, it's more fun. It's more fun, and we think more people will be interested without knowing.
: Readers, I think, are very interested in suspense but usually within the pages, not as part of the marketing plan.
KARP: Well, there is a long tradition of this, from Benjamin Disraeli to Henry Adams, all the way up to "Primary Colors." And there are certainly some people who really want to know who wrote it. On the other hand, it shouldn't matter, in the end, and I hope that people will enjoy the book for what it is.
: I mean, I just, I have this picture of folks in the marketing department sort of rubbing their hands together, thinking about how to roll this out. But it's probably a bit of a logistical challenge for you also because how do you mount a book tour with an anonymous author?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: I mean, are you going to take to the road and do all the interviews?
KARP: No, I'm not. We're just going to let people come to the book on their own. We certainly think President Obama is enough in the news, and the 2012 campaign is going to go on for a very long time, and we're just hoping that this book will be one of the many frames of reference.
: Do me a favor and spell out the basic plotline for the reader, very quickly.
KARP: The novel, it's about people working on both sides of the 2012 campaign. It's about the things people do in the course of an election. It's about the press. It's about the people working on these campaigns. And yes, it's about O and his opponent for the presidency, what they're thinking, some of the decisions they make and how some of those decisions are not necessarily in the best interest of voters.
: And reading the book, it seemed that the author, whoever he or she is, was sort of afraid to take on the racial dimensions of this administration.
KARP: There is a part of the book at the very beginning where O says that people will want change, and his race is part of the change. That's how he, the fictional character, views it.
: See, I wasn't talking about the vernacular, you know, that he speaks in. I was talking about actually, you know, sort of a textured view of Washington in this moment. I mean, it is a groundbreaking presidency, and I was curious just why that wasn't explored a little bit more in the pages of the book.
KARP: Well, I will ask the author and try to get back to you. I think that the author...
: The author can call us any time. We'd love to talk to him or her.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
: I mean, there's a microphone waiting for whoever that might be.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KARP: I think that the author was really viewing the election through the prism of whether or not Barack Obama is going to have to abandon the hopeful message that he communicated last time. I mean, to the author, the dramatic question is: In order to get re-elected, is President Obama going to have to be a different kind of candidate? This election will be a referendum on Barack Obama and the policies that he has asserted. Therefore, he may have to run more negatively, and that's part of what the novel's about.
: Jonathan, it's been great to talk to you.
KARP: Well, it's been great to talk to you, too. Thank you.
: We've been speaking with Jonathan Karp. He is the editor of "O: A Presidential Novel."
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Philadelphia is home to singer Amos Lee. But really, he says, he feels most at home when he's making music out on the road.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HELLO AGAIN")
AMOS LEE: (Singing) Hello again. I know it's been a long time coming.
BLOCK: On his new CD, Amos Lee keeps coming back to this idea that moving on means leaving things behind.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HELLO AGAIN")
LEE: The funny part about that song is I thought it was about somebody else, but it just might be about me.
BLOCK: Oh really? Because there is that line, that just awfully wrenching line: You used to be so beautiful, but you lost it somewhere along the way.
LEE: Don't you feel like that sometimes about yourself?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: On my worst days, yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HELLO AGAIN")
LEE: I mean, it's not all gloom and doom, but there are days when you feel that way. And, you know, with songwriting, you're documenting particular moments. You're not documenting your overall sense of things. I'm not afraid to be bluntly honest in my songs, even if it means that I'm discovering things about myself that I'd rather not.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HELLO AGAIN")
BLOCK: Here's what I don't understand, Amos Lee, that you have this incredible, beautiful voice, but it sounds like you didn't really discover it or perform at all, sing at all, until you were in college, and that's where music became part of your life. I can't figures out how you didn't know before then that you had this instrument.
LEE: I didn't really hang around with anybody who was playing music. I was playing basketball most of the time. So there would be no real reason for me to know or not know that I was talented in that area.
BLOCK: But driving around, hanging out with your friends, there wasn't a point when you would just start singing, and people would go: Hey, you can really sing?
LEE: I wasn't really doing a whole lot of that. When you're a teenage fella, I mean, you're not exactly just singing to people.
BLOCK: You're not bursting into song, yeah.
LEE: Not when you're on the basketball court, really.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
LEE: And I remember there were a bunch of songs that I was really feeling. There was this Power 9 at 9 in Philly, and I used to listen to that all the time, all those great R&B songs that were out in the '90s, and that's what I would record. I would record those songs and then sing along with all of them.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LEE: (Singing) My heart is a flower that blooms every hour. I believe in the power of love.
BLOCK: I've read that you, apart from doing concert tours, which you do all the time, you also perform sometimes outside the margins a bit, and that is how one of these songs, "Stay With Me," came about.
LEE: And, you know, I went on my way, I was playing some other shows, and I wound up in Hawaii. And I was sitting in a room, and I was playing my guitar, and that song just came to me. And I found out that - I'm not sure if it was the same exact day, but it was within a day or two that he had passed.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STAY WITH ME")
LEE: (Singing) One by one, we watch them fall like trees on (unintelligible). There you stay right with me, baby. (Unintelligible). Stay with me. Stay with me.
BLOCK: So how do you think your encounter with that young man who was dying, how did that come out in this song?
LEE: Pretty - I don't know, like pretty purely, I guess you could say. I'm sorry, I'm like, I get a little, like, worked up when I think about him.
BLOCK: Yeah, I can hear that in your voice.
LEE: Yeah, it's sad. It's real sad. I mean, I had another friend of mine who had a similar situation and lost somebody they loved. And, you know, they - it's some of the hardest stuff we go through as people. And for them to be able to face it with such conviction and strength and openness and love, I mean, that's what inspired me and that's what will inspire me forever.
BLOCK: That must have felt like a real gift for both of you, really, to be able to go to his house like you did and play just for him.
LEE: It's pretty amazing what music breaks down. All the barriers and borders that we set up, they're immediately erased when the connection of music is made. Before that moment, we were strangers, and the minute that we shared in that communion of music, we were family. And that's the greatest gift that I feel music has given to me and I try to continue to serve it to the best of my abilities.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "STAY WITH ME")
LEE: (Singing) And when morning comes, just know, darling, (unintelligible).
BLOCK: Amos Lee, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.
LEE: Thank you very much.
BLOCK: Amos Lee's new CD is called "Mission Bell." You can hear full songs from the album at nprmusic.org.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And here at NPR, we're taking advantage of the fractured media with a project called Alt.Latino. It's a blog and a podcast hosted by Jasmine Garsd and Felix Contreras. Like many people, they're using the Internet to create a place for music they aren't hearing on the radio. And they tell us what they mean by Latin alternative music.
JASMINE GARSD: It's not what your parents and grandparents listened to. It's not pure salsa. It's not pure merengue. It's not pure rock.
FELIX CONTRERAS: It's a mishmash of everything else - rock, hip-hop, electronica. Here are three little short blasts of what could be considered Latin alternative music.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BEBE: (Singing in foreign language)
CAIFANES: (Singing in foreign language)
CHOC QUIB TOWN: (Singing in foreign language)
GARSD: So we started off with a Spanish artist called Bebe. We heard the Mexican rock en Espanol pioneers Caifanes and, finally, Choc Quib Town.
CONTRERAS: The messages within the song are just like every other genre.
GARSD: You know, like, I hate my 9:00 to 5:00 job. I want to break up with my girlfriend.
CONTRERAS: I want to find a girlfriend.
GARSD: You know, if you turn on your primetime television, if there is a conversation about Latinos, it's likely going to be about Latinos as a problem. And a lot of times, it's a conversation in which Latinos aren't even participating. As the show progresses, we more and more feel this sense of presenting songs that discuss the Latino experience from a Latino perspective.
CONTRERAS: And almost always those messages are delivered in Spanish, and that brings us to another factor that can separate cultures that we address in our show - language. We try to go over the lyrics of what the bands are singing. Once people come to the music and they hear it and once they find a place for themselves in the music, then it becomes a lot more accessible, and it's just - it's something that binds people together as opposed to dividing us.
GARSD: I think we should close this segment out with a song called "Compartir" or "To Share" by Carla Morrison, a young artist from Mexico.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COMPARTIR")
CONTRERAS: You know, her music is an example of the interaction of cultures and musical styles. I mean, if she sang in English, her music would be right at home on any number of English language radio playlist.
GARSD: Okay, not all, just the cool ones, like us.
CONTRERAS: There you go.
GARSD: I'm Jasmine Garsd.
CONTRERAS: And I'm Felix Contreras. Please check us out on Alt.Latino.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COMPARTIR")
CARLA MORRISON: (Singing in foreign language)
NORRIS: Alt.Latino, the blog and podcast, is part of our website, nprmusic.org.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COMPARTIR")
MORRISON: (Singing in foreign language)
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Elizabeth Blair gets us started.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: So, what is this called?
CASEY RAE: The academic word for this is disintermediation.
BLAIR: Casey Rae-Hunter heads up the Future of Music Coalition.
RAE: But that's a mouthful, so fractured culture works just fine.
ALYSSA ROSENBERG: Fractured implies that something is broken. It's wounded.
BLAIR: Alyssa Rosenberg writes a column for The Atlantic. She prefers another word.
ROSENBERG: The fragmentation of culture is a wonderful thing.
BLAIR: And Mark Lopez of the Pew Hispanic Research Center was just confused when I asked him about fractured culture.
MARK LOPEZ: Hmm, I was actually going to ask you what it means. I wasn't sure exactly what it means.
BLAIR: But he took a stab at it, explaining the fracturing he sees in the Latino population.
LOPEZ: For example, young Latinos are straddling two different cultures. They're straddling the culture of their immigrant roots, but also an American culture as well.
BLAIR: Unidentified Woman #1 (Actress): (as Character) (Foreign language spoken)
(SOUNDBITE OF TV PROGRAM)
BLAIR: Unidentified Group: Surprise.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV PROGRAM, "MODERN FAMILY")
DAN SCHNEIDER: A really great comedy that's popular and new that's on the air right now.
TY BURRELL: Unidentified Woman #2 (Actress): (as Character) No, no. I'm sorry.
BURRELL: Unidentified Woman #2: (as Character) Oh, my god.
BURRELL: (as Phil Dunphy) Yeah. Our kids walked in on us.
SCHNEIDER: But if you go walk around the streets or if you go walk around the mall and say, hey, did you see last week's "Modern Family," you know, how many people out of 10 are going to say, oh, yeah, I saw it? The television markets are so nichey that even a popular show isn't watched by, you know, most people that you're going to run into.
BLAIR: The music industry, same thing. Casey Rae-Hunter of the Future of Music Coalition says this fragmentation has opened up the world for creators and consumers alike.
RAE: The arrival of the Internet to some degree leveled the playing field, and that allowed, you know, a plethora of folks who otherwise would've had no shot of getting on, say, commercial radio to be heard. It's really an amazing time to be a fan.
FAY FERGUSON: It's ushering in a totally different era of communication.
BLAIR: Fay Ferguson is co-CEO of Burrell Communications, an African- American ad agency founded 40 years ago.
FERGUSON: Based on the principle that black people are not dark- skinned white people.
BLAIR: And, says Ferguson, that African-Americans are a separate, viable market. She says there have always been many American cultures.
FERGUSON: This has always existed, but technology has been an enabler. So that now there's actually a way to get to these smaller groups efficiently.
BLAIR: Alyssa Rosenberg of The Atlantic says maybe, but she also thinks it will make us appreciate the mass cultural events that do occur even more, like the end of the "Harry Potter" series or when Michael Jackson died.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MAN IN THE MIRROR")
MICHAEL JACKSON: (Singing) I'm going to make a change for once in my life.
BLAIR: His death affected millions, whether you're a fan or a former fan or just recognize his influence.
ROSENBERG: It was enormous because we were united in a way that we aren't normally. It added significance to the event.
BLAIR: Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
As NPR's Mike Shuster explains, in the past, when these negotiations broke down, a feeling of panic set in, but not this time.
MIKE SHUSTER: Not possible, said Catherine Ashton, the European Union's director of foreign policy, after the talks broke up on Saturday.
CATHERINE ASHTON: We had hoped to have a detailed and constructive discussion of those ideas, but it became clear that the Iranian side was not ready for this, unless we agreed to preconditions relating to enrichment and sanctions. Both these preconditions are not a way to proceed.
SHUSTER: Iranian leaders tried to put the best face on the process. Although it was apparent Iran went into the talks with little desire to reach agreement, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a speech on Sunday, proclaimed that he believes progress is achievable.
MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD: (Speaking foreign language)
SHUSTER: Before, it seemed that Iran was making progress in expanding its uranium enrichment program nearly every day - but not so lately. Before, it seemed the only options for action to pressure Iran were diplomacy or war. Now, says David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security, a whole range of actions has emerged between the two extremes, most of them apparently successful covert operations.
DAVID ALBRIGHT: Much more aggressive actions by intelligence agencies to disrupt Iran's attempts to buy things illegally overseas, agencies focus on disrupting their smuggling networks. They have killed Iranian nuclear scientists. They appear to have launched a pretty successful cyber attack against Iran's enrichment plant. It wasn't a knockdown punch, but it sure sends a signal to Iran that we can get you whenever we want.
SHUSTER: So the U.S. and Europe may be content to wait and see what Iran might do, despite a lack of progress in the current talks. That's the view of Leonard Spector of the Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies.
LEONARD SPECTOR: Well, I'm not too concerned, because I think the whole dynamics of these talks has shifted over the last year, year and a half, from the point where we originally were the ones that were very anxious to see progress. And now I have a feeling the Iranians may eventually be the ones that are looking for a way out because the circumstances have changed a bit.
SHUSTER: Mike Shuster, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
David Greene has been at the airport all day and he joins us now. David, it sounds like things have calmed down a bit at the airport.
DAVID GREENE: Unidentified Woman: (Speaking foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF ANNOUNCEMENT)
GREENE: That's telling people that the airport is operating normally. And it's amazing because it was anything but that earlier today when this huge bomb exploded in the international arrivals terminal.
NORRIS: It almost reminds you of that old British adage, keep calm and carry on. What do you know about what actually happened in the explosion?
GREENE: We've been talking to witnesses here in this surreal scene. You know, this busy terminal where some people were going and getting their flights and others are still talking about what took place. I want to play a little bit from a 30- year-old named Artiyon Jelenkov(ph). He was in the airport meeting his colleague, who was arriving from Dusseldorf and he was right in the thick of it. You know, he had flesh and blood on his head. And here's what he remembered from when the bomb went off.
ARTIYON JELENKOV: (Through translator) This man came into the center, then there was an explosion. I remember, I noticed a suitcase there, too. Either the man exploded or the suitcase. Then, just torn bodies. People who could stand up ran outside. It was bad.
NORRIS: David, this arrivals area where this took place, was this before passengers would go through any kind of screening?
GREENE: Well, if you think about an international airport, Michele, this one is just like a lot of others. I mean, you go through the routine. You arrive, you go through immigration, then you collect your luggage and you come through customs and you come out and meet people. And it was people who were going through that routine, grabbing their luggage and coming out to meet a crowd of people who - that's the area where we think this took place.
NORRIS: You know, the notion that the airport continued running, despite this carnage today, will be surprising, I think, to many of our listeners. I'm wondering what sort of response you actually expect to see and hear from Russian leadership after today's events.
GREENE: But I think Russian officials are going to face a lot of questions. I mean, even in the wake of some attacks in the past, the airport security here was lax enough to allow this to happen. Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, has already cancelled his trip to the economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. And he says he's going to go after these people. But I think Russian leaders will be facing some questions in the days ahead.
NORRIS: And no claims of responsibility as of yet?
GREENE: Not yet. In the past we've seen claims and attacks like this from militants, from the volatile north Caucasus region, southern Russia, where there's an Islamist insurgency brewing, but so far, no claim on this attack, Michele.
NORRIS: David, thank you very much.
GREENE: Thank you.
NORRIS: THAt's NPR's David Greene speaking to us from Moscow.
: Did the Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang mean to send a pointed message with the song he played at the state dinner at the White House last Wednesday.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY MOTHERLAND")
: Unidentified Woman: (Singing in foreign language)
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY MOTHERLAND")
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "BATTLE ON SHANGGANLING MOUNTAIN")
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
: The film portrays the war as a triumph over U.S. imperialism and has been used as anti-American propaganda. But I when I reached Lang Lang today, he said he had no idea about any of that.
LANG LANG: The truth is, I only know this piece because it's a beautiful melody. And, actually, I played many times as encore before because it's, artistically, it's a beautiful piece. I never thought about, you know, and I never knew about anything about, you know, the background.
: Well, some people, as you know, on blogs in China, are seizing on this, saying that it was a moment for a world famous pianist to sort of drop a note of nationalism, of Chinese nationalism into the States here.
LANG: So for me, you know, to be invited to play at White House is a great honor. And especially, you know, to play for president of my homeland and also the country which I live, which is America. So, I only wanted to bring the best, you know, of the music melodies. And that's it, you know. I am absolutely say it from bottom of my heart that, you know, I think music, it's a bridge between our cultures.
: The song that you played, in the movie, in the "Battle on Shangganling Mountain," which came out in 1956, it is a very nationalistic song and it...
LANG: You know, I never know about that movie. I just learned it afterward. It's like, 1956. This is when my mother was two years old. I mean, this is 55 years ago. And when I grew up, I only hear this as a beautiful melody. That's it. And this piece is very popular as a traditional Chinese song.
: I've been told that this song is a favorite at karaoke bars.
LANG: Yeah. I mean, it's just, you know, it's a song that, like, everyone in the Chinese world knows about the melody. You know, I mean, that's the truth. I mean, I choose it because its beautiful melody. I have this connection through the melody. It's a really beautiful melody.
: Well, Lang Lang, what were your - how did you react when you heard that in China, on the Web, people were adding meaning to this choice thinking you were sort of thumbing your nose at the United States in some way? What did you think?
LANG: I feel very sad. You know, I very sad. And, you know, and I must say, disappointing. Because, you know, as a person, what I'm trying to do, and what my missions are, you know, making music. And, you know, I'm very honored that people inviting me to play in those great events and to connect us to classical music and to music, to Chinese music and to American music, to, you know, to world music. And once, you know, people use it as a political issue, that makes me really sad because I am a musician. I'm not a politician.
: Well, Lang Lang, it's good to talk to you. Thanks very much.
LANG: OK. Bye-bye.
: The pianist Lang Lang talking about the song, "My Motherland," which he played at the state dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao at the White House last Wednesday.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And it's time now for All Tech Considered.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
NORRIS: As NPR's Laura Sydell reports, Larry Page is notoriously shy, and many wonder how he will fare as head of the world's largest Internet company.
LAURA SYDELL: Ken Auletta, the author of "Googled: The End of the World As We Know It," says the question is, can he run the company?
KEN AULETTA: He's not a particularly good speaker. He is not a particularly sociable guy. He hates people micromanaging his schedule. He doesn't like to be confined. Well, a CEO is confined.
SYDELL: Page isn't known as the kind of guy who's good at schmoozing with other executives, also part of being a CEO. Auletta says the first time Page met with media mogul Barry Diller, Page was looking down and typing on his PDA while Diller tried to talk to him.
AULETTA: And he says, Larry, I'm trying to talk. Can you just converse with me? He says, it's OK, Barry, I can do both. I can look at this device and talk to you. He says, no, no, Larry, choose. And, Larry, without looking up, says, I choose this.
SYDELL: But Page has also been watching the more experienced Eric Schmidt run the company for 10 years. Page also read a book as a young man about one of his heroes that brought home how important it is to be good at business. The inventor, Nikola Tesla, along with Thomas Edison, was pivotal to the development of electricity.
AULETTA: And he wound up dying destitute because unlike Thomas Edison, he wasn't a good businessman.
SYDELL: Page also likes to solve problems, and he'll bring that to pushing Google forward, says David Vise, author of "The Google Story." For example, he grew up outside of Detroit and was also bothered by traffic jams and accidents.
DAVID VISE: And he actually has thought about such things as automated cars that drive themselves and move at a kind of optimal speed without ever causing accidents or ever causing slow downs.
SYDELL: Google recently announced that it's working on a car that drives itself. In the last two years, Page has watched his company start to look like the old guard in Silicon Valley, as Facebook has taken on the mantle of the innovative upstart. Vise thinks that Page is really going to push to reclaim that mantle.
VISE: And that's really the key for a company like this - to stay out in front, to stay ahead and to continually surprise and delight users.
SYDELL: Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Forty percent of the people who play video games in the U.S. are female. That's according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group. But as 17-year-old Jessica Cernadas sees it, video games are designed to appeal to guys. And she tells us that is very frustrating.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME CONTROLLER)
JESSICA CERNADAS: Unidentified Woman #1: You're crazy. You talk to the game. You scream at the game.
CERNADAS: Unidentified Woman #1: Well, you never liked dolls.
CERNADAS: I chopped off all their hair.
BLOCK: And I didn't get it.
CERNADAS: I used to play only with my friends. But now I play hardcore games online, where most of the other gamers are guys. And they're just really rude.
OOZIE: Unidentified Man: (As Announcer) Finish him.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME)
CERNADAS: Finish him. That's Oozie, one of my friends from school.
OOZIE: Every time there's a girl talking on a mic, I try to flirt with her.
CERNADAS: Do you think you're better than most guys?
STEPHANIE: Hell, yes.
CERNADAS: Stephanie is one of the best gamers I know.
STEPHANIE: I have beaten most of the guys in my school. So, yes.
CERNADAS: So let's say you've been playing against a guy, right? And you told them that you were a girl, would they...
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CERNADAS: Would they not believe you, or have they not believed you?
STEPHANIE: Well, I told this one dude and he didn't believe me 'cause I beat him by one point. And he goes, OK, if you were a girl, then show me some - beep. I was, like, no.
CERNADAS: It's hard to get any confidence when you're constantly mocked. And the way women are portrayed in these games doesn't help either.
STEPHANIE: In real life, if a girl ever fights, they usually have, like, sneakers and, like, little shirts. But in, like, games, they have (makes noise).
CERNADAS: Unidentified Woman #2: Bayonetta.
(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO GAME)
CERNADAS: The men in these games...
OOZIE: Guys will be strong...
CERNADAS: ...are made to be beautiful, muscular...
OOZIE: ...muscular...
CERNADAS: ...tall...
OOZIE: ...cool.
CERNADAS: ...and just plain awesome.
OOZIE: Oh, yeah, yeah. And, like, usually you have to save the girl in the game, most games. Heroic. Yeah.
(SOUNDBITE OF GIGGLING)
CERNADAS: The person giggling is Caryn Law, the only female employee at Uber Entertainment, a small game developing company in Washington.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
CERNADAS: She's testing their new game with John Comes, the creative director.
(SOUNDBITE OF OFFICE)
CERNADAS: Caryn Law plays online as Hell Chick.
CARYN LAW: I guess looking back on it, people ask me, why did you pick a name that was Hell Chick - that's obviously a woman? I'd say, well, I didn't really do it deliberately, but I'm also not going to change it just because I don't feel like I should have to hide behind my gender.
JOHN COMES: Just a couple months ago, Caryn and I were playing "Modern Warfare" online and as soon as she said something, lo and behold, somebody's, like, whoa, Hell Chick, you're a chick. You sound hot. Are you hot?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
COMES: And it just, like, unraveled from there. And Caryn's, like, I'm muting. Hold on a second, I got to mute all these guys. And it's just - that's when I was embarrassed for my gender, actually.
LAW: Yeah.
CERNADAS: I can't help you out there, Mr. Comes. You're the creative director. You should have some say in what goes on. We want strong women who can punch and kick and (unintelligible) punch without taking off their itty bitty strips of cloth.
LAW: I think that it's possible to make female characters be not hyper- sexualized.
CERNADAS: Caryn Law actually told me she's working on a game with a girl character who's completely covered and she's a ninja.
LAW: But a bit of a catch-22 in that in order to make more games that would appeal to more women, you really need to have more women helping to make them. But in order to get more women to help make them, you have to have more games that appeal to them in the first place.
CERNADAS: I need to play to get my juices flowing, so I can create my own super awesome sci-fi adventure strategy game where women rule and men are dressed in Speedos. Ew.
BLOCK: That's 17-year-old Jessica Cernadas. Her story comes to us from Radio Rookies at member station WNYC in New York City.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From Jerusalem, NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro explains.
LOURDES GARCIA: Much of what is there was already known. But the documents do reveal that the Palestinians offered to make several major concessions, in talks with the government of the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, save one, would fall under Israeli sovereignty. Only a token number of refugees would have the right to return to their homes. Israelis seemingly rejected the offers.
YASSER ABED RABBO: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA: At a press conference in Ramallah, senior Palestinian official Yasser Abed Rabbo accused al-Jazeera of spreading disinformation, as part of a concerted campaign to undermine the Palestinian Authority.
ABED RABBO: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA: Abdul Sattar-Qasim is a professor of political science in the West Bank University of An-Najah.
ABDUL SATTAR: The Palestinian Authority is just an agent and so many of the Palestinian leaders had been made by the Israeli and the Americans. And they are carrying out an American and Israeli agenda. It's not a Palestinian agenda.
GARCIA: So far, there's been little reaction to the revelations by the Israeli government. Only Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman spoke out on the radio.
AVIGDOR L: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA: Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Jerusalem.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Michele Kelemen put those questions to Americans who've been involved in the peace negotiations.
MICHELE KELEMEN: A former ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, has been writing about U.S. mediation efforts in the Middle East and says there are some lessons to be drawn from the latest leaked documents.
DANIEL KURTZER: Assuming the information in the papers is close to reality, it raises very substantial questions as to why the Bush administration didn't understand that there had been a significant narrowing of differences, and that a big push a couple of years ago might actually have advanced this process rather substantially.
KELEMEN: Kurtzer, who now teaches at Princeton University, says the Obama administration also comes across as reluctant to put ideas on the table. He says the leaks would show that the Palestinians were ready in 2008 to make major compromises, should push the Obama administration to, quote, "get its act together" and show some leadership.
KURTZER: The gaps are far narrower than people would have assumed. And therefore, if the administration has been waiting for that narrowing to put forward a bridging position, it now has evidence that the bridge can be built.
KELEMEN: Another U.S. veteran of the peace process, Robert Danin, of the Council on Foreign Relations, cautions against reading too much into the documents.
ROBERT DANIN: And so, those who believe that a negotiated settlement is possible will be bolstered by these revelations. Those who believe that the Israelis are not serious will point to certain things here and say that that's what it demonstrates.
KELEMEN: One thing is clear, Danin adds, the leaks will make it harder for the Obama administration to revive talks.
DANIN: And that I think was its design. It was released by people who think that the negotiations do not serve Palestinian interests and that this is not the way to go.
KELEMEN: The leaks come at a time when Palestinians are already working on Plan B, taking their cause to the United Nations to try to win Palestinian statehood. Former Ambassador Kurtzer says the leaks will give more impetus to this push at the U.N.
KURTZER: The argument now is, look how far we went, we didn't get anything in return, so why shouldn't we go to the U.N.?
KELEMEN: And what should the U.S. response be to that, do you think?
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
KURTZER: If I were the administration now, I'd be very worried because there is not a good response.
KELEMEN: As State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley repeated today, New York is not the place to resolve the conflict.
CROWLEY: The best and only way to fundamentally resolve the core issues, reach an agreement and end the conflict once and for all is through a negotiation, not through unilateral statements, unilateral actions.
KELEMEN: Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
That includes a fiancee, as NPR's legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports.
NINA TOTENBERG: Now married, Thompson and Regalado said they had to move to Arkansas to find employment. Last month, they talked about his case when it was argued before the Supreme Court.
MIRIAM REGALADO: This was, you know, sending a message to other employees. They're saying: Don't you dare, you know, do what she did. Otherwise, we'll take care of you like we did with her.
ERIC THOMPSON: This is the worst part of the whole ordeal is the message and intimidation.
TOTENBERG: Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington.
P: jury duty.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
The vice president reported this morning to the New Castle County courthouse in Wilmington, Delaware. He sat in the Assembly Room, along with dozens of other prospective jurors and a few Secret Service agents.
: And that was it. Biden, along with other jurors, were dismissed around noon. According to the News Journal in Wilmington, the vice president said it was an honor to be a part of the system.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Mara, so will the president lay out several new initiatives?
MARA LIASSON: The Republican story, of course, is much simpler - cut, cut, cut and rip up the credit cards - but this is what the president is going to try to lay out tomorrow night.
NORRIS: Well, what role might, say, deficit spending play in this new re-election narrative?
LIASSON: Now, of course, Republicans see every one of the president's investments as more unnecessary spending or ineffective stimulus, but that's going to be the big fight over the two next years. And the State of the Union is the president's chance to go first and define the terms of that debate.
NORRIS: Mara, what about the tone in the room? Andrea Seabrook was just telling us about all the Republicans and Democrats that might be sitting together tomorrow night. Does that help the president?
LIASSON: And you saw - that happened already during the lame-duck, during the memorial service in Tucson. His numbers have been going up as he has been able to return to the kind of politician that he was when he first burst on the scene. So I think it will help him, but the speech is only one hour, and soon as it's over, we'll be back to the battle lines and the big fight over spending.
NORRIS: Well, as he lays out what you're calling his re-election narrative, I'm curious about the re-election campaign that we've recently learned that the president is setting up his campaign headquarters far from Washington, in Chicago. Tell us why he decided to do that.
LIASSON: Well, this is the first time that any president has ever set up his re-election campaign so far from Washington. George W. Bush put it in Arlington, right over the river. But the president's aides want to get out of the bubble. They think there's some value to being outside of the Beltway, and they've set up a system where they think they can coordinate very seamlessly with David Plouffe, who's the old architect of the first campaign. He's now going to be inside. David Axelrod is going back to Chicago. There are many Democratic operatives that I've talked to who are skeptical about whether this kind of bifurcated system can work with most of the top - many of the top advisers very far away.
NORRIS: Mara, always good to talk to you.
LIASSON: Good to talk to you too.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From Chicago, NPR's David Schaper reports.
DAVID SCHAPER: Emanuel had a sizable lead in most polls, but now Emanuel must step up his fight just to get his name listed on next month's ballot.
RAHM EMANUEL: How are you guys? How's everybody doing?
SCHAPER: In a hastily called news conference this afternoon, Emanuel said he will appeal today's ruling to the Illinois Supreme Court.
EMANUEL: And I have no doubt that we will, in the end, prevail at this effort. As my father always used to say: Nothing's ever easy in life. So nothing's ever easy. So this is just one turn in the road.
SCHAPER: In December, the Chicago Board of Elections ruled in Emanuel's favor, placing his name on the ballot, and when the challengers took the case to state court, a just ruled in Emanuel's favor, too. But on appeal, the higher court reversed those earlier rulings.
DAVID FRANKLIN: And the appeals court decision today strikes me, on a first read, as legally defensible but somewhat strained.
SCHAPER: David Franklin is a law professor and elections law expert at Chicago's DePaul University. He says the appellate court is applying two standards to Emanuel, agreeing on the one hand that he did maintain a legal domicile in Chicago.
FRANKLIN: So he's clearly qualified to vote in the mayoral election, and the Court of Appeals agreed with that in its decision today, but it said that to be a candidate, you have to have something more than just domicile, which is to say you have to actually live in Chicago for a year prior to the election. That he clearly didn't do.
SCHAPER: David Schaper, NPR News, Chicago.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Tom Goldman profiled Jack LaLanne back in 2004, and today, he has this remembrance.
TOM GOLDMAN: Honest to God, when I heard the news last night that Jack LaLanne had died, my first reaction was: Really? Because I think after spending that day with him in 2004, when he was 89, I came away thinking: This little guy may go forever.
JACK L: Harder Jack. Come on. Harder. I've only got one enemy: Jack LaLanne. That's it.
GOLDMAN: I'll always remember my first sight of him: chest-deep in water in his outdoor pool wearing a red swim cap, blue Speedos, pushing and pulling yellow resistance devices. It was 7:15 in the morning, and LaLanne was on. All I had to do was point my microphone.
LANNE: You know, for me, you know, I usually hit the gym around five or six in the morning. To leave a hot bed, leave a hot woman, go into a cold gym takes a lot of discipline, boy, I'll tell you. But the wonderful thing - I hate it, I've never liked to exercise, but I like results.
GOLDMAN: Imagine a drill sergeant so charismatic, so positively chirpy that you don't realize he's kicking your flabby rear end. That was the magic of Jack LaLanne for the millions of Americans who watched him on black-and-white TV in his trademark one-piece jumpsuit.
LANNE: I'm not talking about the hangover, the kind that you get from overindulgence. I'm talking about the kind you get from lack of exercise and eating too much of the wrong foods. You know, you're hanging here and hanging here, and everything's hanging.
GOLDMAN: And for me, who dared to ask LaLanne whether busy, busy people really have time for all that exercise...
LANNE: Stand up. Don't use your hand. Sit down. Stand up. Now get your buttocks only about a half-inch off the chair. Now down, just a half-inch, a little lower, a little lower. Now up. Now do it fast, fast, up, down. Now do it slow, real slow, all the way down. Now, see, you're watching television, and you're getting a workout. You feel that, don't you?
GOLDMAN: LaLanne spread his message of healthy living with a missionary passion and devotion. Indeed, it was, he told me, his religion.
LANNE: My life. That's why I was put on this Earth, I believe this, to help people.
GOLDMAN: LaLanne was hooked by the message. He stopped eating sugar forever. He started exercising daily. To prove it all worked, he would do the stunts, like swimming handcuffed and towing a boat from Alcatraz to San Francisco at the age of 60. But it was the personal messages to millions that resonated most. He never stopped trying to help us all have our own fitness epiphanies.
NORRIS: Tom Goldman, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And, Ted, I understand this not guilty plea was not a surprise.
TED ROBBINS: Right, Michele. Lawyers who are - have handled capital cases tell me that it's really unlikely that a judge would accept a guilty plea this soon without any evidence being presented, because the defendant, Loughner, would really not have had a chance to consider the implications of a guilty plea.
NORRIS: Ted, we've all seen that mug shot of Jared Loughner grinning after the shootings. It's an image that is fixed in many people's minds. How did he actually look today?
ROBBINS: His attorney, Judy Clarke, frequently put her hand on his back when asking him questions, sort of seemed to reassure him. And he was alert throughout the proceeding, and he gave a small smile whenever he looked around.
NORRIS: Beyond Loughner, what was the tone like in the courtroom overall?
ROBBINS: It was not full. But it's a huge courtroom, and it was pretty quiet and expectant, I'd say.
NORRIS: Loughner today faced federal charges for trying to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords and two of her aides. And as we said, he entered this not guilty plea. So what comes next?
ROBBINS: Here's what she said.
ANDREA LYON: You need to know family history, medical history, psychological history, drug or alcohol problem, you know, physiological problems and any of those sorts of things first.
ROBBINS: Yeah, a psych evaluation was not brought up today. They may wait till all the charges are brought for that.
NORRIS: Ted, this is a very complicated case with lots of victims and a suspect who is described as having had serious trouble before the shootings. How is the case against him expected to play out? And what will happen in terms of other charges involving other victims?
ROBBINS: Now, we spoke with a former federal prosecutor, Andrew McBride, who told me he did not think that would work at the trial itself.
ANDREW MCBRIDE: Although the insanity defense is not likely to prevail at the guilt phase, it can be effective at the penalty phase to say to the jury: Yes, this man did it, but he was under delusion and he should not be punished with the ultimate punishment. That, I think, is how the case will sort out.
ROBBINS: But then, at the penalty phase, they could give him the death penalty. And, Michele, if the Feds don't get the death penalty for Loughner, you know, the State of Arizona will likely seek it for the other victims. So this whole process could take years.
NORRIS: Ted, thank you.
ROBBINS: You're welcome.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Ted Robbins who joined us from the federal courthouse in Phoenix.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Valerie Hans is an expert on the jury system and a professor of law at Cornell. She says it's very hard to get a change of venue request approved, and it should be hard.
VALERIE HANS: And there is some logistical things, too, that it's a lot easier for victims and witnesses to attend proceedings, to observe what is going on and to see how the local attorneys are managing the case on their behalf.
BLOCK: But from the defense point of view, there is the issue of taint and whether their client is going to be getting a fair trial. So how does a judge weigh that against the interest of having a trial in the community in which the crime occurred?
HANS: There's another matter, too, in the Tucson shootings. There were so many victims. And so you have lots of people in the local community who might be directly connected to one of the victims of the shootings. And that might also make it very difficult to find a jury that is unbiased in the City of Tucson.
BLOCK: Professor Hans, do you look back at the decision in the Oklahoma City bombing case, to move that trial from Oklahoma City to Denver? Do you look at that and say that is really the model that will likely be followed in Arizona? Of course, in Oklahoma City, there were many, many more victims.
HANS: I think that Timothy McVeigh case is a really good model. In Oklahoma City, again, the many connections that community members had with the victims made it extremely difficult to have a fair and unbiased jury, or select a fair and unbiased jury, in the usual methods that the trial court relies on to try to weed out people who really can be fair and open in listening to the evidence of the case. And in Tucson, there may very well be the same kind of connections in the local community.
BLOCK: And it's those connections that are really the key here, right? Because they don't expect jurors to be a complete blank slate, never having heard of a crime. The question is, can they be impartial?
HANS: And it's going to be up Judge Larry Burns to balance all of these factors; the desire for Tucson to see justice done in this particular case in its own community, and the rights of the defendant to have a fair and impartial jury decide the case.
BLOCK: Professor Hans, thanks for talking with us.
HANS: My pleasure.
BLOCK: Valerie Hans is a professor at Cornell Law School.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
That's how much taxpayers have spent on legal fees to defend the mortgage giants and their former executives against pending lawsuits, as NPR's Tamara Keith reports.
TAMARA KEITH: Throughout the past decade, these firms and their top executives made some huge mistakes - bad investments, bad decisions. In September 2008, the two massive firms became the responsibility of U.S. taxpayers. And so did their legal fees. Since the government took over Fannie and Freddie, those fees have totaled more than $160 million.
RANDY NEUGEBAUER: The fact that we are still paying those legal fees is a great concern to me and should be a concern to the American taxpayers.
KEITH: Congressman Randy Neugebauer is a Texas Republican who heads the subcommittee that oversees Fannie and Freddie. He requested the information about legal fees from the firms' regulator and then released the information.
NEUGEBAUER: It brings the question, what other things are going on over there that might not be in place to minimize taxpayers' exposure?
KEITH: The firms' regulator defends paying the legal fees. And Charles Elson, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Delaware, says there's really no choice.
CHARLES ELSON: It's one of these you can feel bad and be angry about it, but in the end, you're not going to change very much and probably nor should you.
KEITH: He says almost all contracts for corporate executives include indemnification clauses that say the company will pay legal fees if there's a lawsuit or criminal investigation. Otherwise, no one would take these sorts of jobs.
ELSON: Bottom line is until the court says that these people have acted badly, the company and obviously its owners, the taxpayers, are on the hook.
KEITH: Phillip Swagel is a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland.
PHILLIP SWAGEL: I would say the most important thing now is to resolve the situation of Fannie and Freddie so that there are not more losses.
KEITH: Tamara Keith, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
The State of the Union address is a solemn affair. The president lays out goals and accomplishments before a gathering of the powerful: Supreme Court justices, the military Joint Chiefs and, of course, Congress.
T: NPR's Andrea Seabrook tells us who's going with whom.
ANDREA SEABROOK: Now, in order to understand just how different this will be, you have to know how things usually work. First of all, the House of Representatives does not have assigned seating - at all, ever. In fact, says Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, if you watch the House on any normal day, the lawmakers milling around don't often sort themselves by party.
NANCY PELOSI: Sometimes, it comes down to region - you know, the Pennsylvania corner; the Massachusetts folks are here; sometimes, it's the Hispanic Caucus is here; and the Black Caucus. Just depends on what the conversation is at the moment.
SEABROOK: Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin told Fox News, he found a colleague from his home state.
DICK DURBIN: My new Senate Republican colleague from Illinois, Mark Kirk, and I are going to sit together. I'm bringing the popcorn; he's bringing a Coke with two straws. I'm just kidding, of course.
SEABROOK: And the quintessential middle-America Republican, Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, will sit with the quintessential East Coast Democrat, New York Senator Chuck Schumer.
CHARLES SCHUMER: We're going to sit together at the State of the Union, and we hope that many others will follow us. Now, that's symbolic, but maybe it just sets a tone and everything gets a little bit more civil.
SEABROOK: Of course, it's an idea that has its critics.
MIKE PENCE: You know, there's a lot of talk these days around here about where members of Congress are going to sit during the State of the Union address.
SEABROOK: Indiana Republican Mike Pence spoke on the House floor.
PENCE: Well, I've been in Congress for 10 years. I learned a long time ago, it doesn't really matter where you sit, it matters where you stand.
SEABROOK: But Coburn, the Republican from Oklahoma, told NBC the two parties often don't approach each other with respect.
TOM COBURN: We talk past each other, not to each other.
SEABROOK: Of course, Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi pointed out that, as speaker...
PELOSI: I have been sitting next to Vice President Cheney for a long time.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SEABROOK: Andrea Seabrook, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Reporter Dan Charles has their story.
DAN CHARLES: One of those farmers is Tim Winn. He's lived on the same farm his whole life.
TIM WINN: I try to be considerate of my neighbors, and I think that would extend right clear up into my farming.
CHARLES: Another is Frank Morton who moved to Oregon to go to college.
FRANK MORTON: I probably intended to be an artist, but I had a plan which was that first I should be a farmer. And then at least I wouldn't be a starving artist.
CHARLES: Organic farmer Frank Morton is on one side of the battle.
MORTON: I'm on record as saying that the valley is not big enough to have genetically-engineered crops and normal crops growing together without, inevitably, cross-contamination happening.
CHARLES: But Tim Winn says there's nothing new or risky that Frank Morton or his customers should worry about.
WINN: We can invent a perceived risk in our mind, a lot of us do. And if the science doesn't support it, then it's not a risk. If his customers are concerned about it, then, I guess, if he wants to stay in business with those customers, it would be in his interest to educate them.
CHARLES: This standoff is more than just a local dispute. It's raising the question of whether genetically-engineered crops and organic farms can be good neighbors in the Willamette Valley or anywhere.
(SOUNDBITE OF VEHICLE STARTING)
CHARLES: The best place to start to understand this controversy is probably the farm where Morton grows his organic seeds: Gathering Together Farm.
MORTON: Cabbage, arugula, Swiss chard, turnips.
CHARLES: We pass one field after another.
MORTON: This is about a quarter acre of chard seed here - or it will be for chard seed. Would you like to get out?
CHARLES: As it happens, Morton says, there's a sugar beet seed grower straight across the fields a couple of miles away.
MORTON: Apparently, they're not finding my red chard or gold chard seed in their sugar beets, and I haven't found any of their genetics in mine that I know of. There's always some question, and that's the problem is there's always some question.
CHARLES: Now, the local seed growers association has a system for avoiding cross-pollination. The approach is charmingly low tech, just a map of the valley with a lot of pins stuck in it to show where each seed crop is planted. For farmers, it's first come, first served. If you pin a sugar beet field, nobody else is supposed to grow seed for Swiss chard within three miles.
GEORGE BURT: Here's a sugar beet field that's pinned. There's another one that's pinned.
CHARLES: George Burt helped set up this pinning system when he was manager of the West Coast Beet Seed Company. He's now retired.
BURT: You're really trying to minimize the risk, and you can get it down to the point where you're relatively sure that you're not hurting anybody else and no one is hurting you.
CHARLES: If they got into his chard or red beets, he says, it would violate his organic principles and it would destroy his business because his customers wouldn't buy his seeds anymore. In fact, he says, just the possibility of contamination is starting to hurt.
MORTON: We think that buyers from overseas - organic seed companies - we think they have already begun to avoid buying from us.
CHARLES: Organic grower Frank Morton says his business cannot survive if there are genetically-engineered crops, often called GMOs, anywhere nearby.
MORTON: It will be a valley fit for growing GMOs, but it won't be a valley where people from Europe and Japan and Korea come to have seed grown.
CHARLES: And Tim Winn says Frank Morton's demands and his lawsuit could cripple a crucial industry.
WINN: Because, quite honestly, if you regulate this valley to the point where you don't have, you know, sugar beet seed production or the production of some other major commodities, that's a huge deal.
CHARLES: For NPR News, I'm Dan Charles.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Serri Graslie reports.
SERRI GRASLIE: Thomas Lowry is the retired psychiatrist who discovered the pardon. He told the story to MORNING EDITION host Bob Edwards in 1998.
THOMAS LOWRY: Unidentified Man: With just hours to live himself.
LOWRY: Unidentified Man: Wow.
GRASLIE: Lowry and his wife discovered the document while researching hundreds of the president's pardons. Ed Steer is the Lincoln biographer who knows Lowry. And he says fellow historians were excited about the find.
ED STEER: We sort of had this morbid interest in every moment of his last moments. And it is so typical of Abraham Lincoln that among the last things that he did, presumably, was to pardon a soldier.
GRASLIE: The National Archives put the pardon on public display in 2000. Archivist Trevor Plant would show the original to visitors and he says he didn't think twice about the date for years.
TREVOR PLANT: And the more I used it, the more it just - it just didn't look right. The five was a little bit darker, which in itself, isn't, you know, necessarily a red flag, but it looked like there was a number underneath it and I kind of got this gut feeling that something wasn't right here.
GRASLIE: Plant did some research which gave him reason to believe that the pardon's issue date was actually 1864, not 1865. He handed his information over to the Archives' inspector general's office, which began an investigation. He says they emailed Lowry asking for help.
PLANT: The more it became apparent what they were working on, then he stopped writing back.
GRASLIE: Serri Graslie, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
The Marine Corps is at a crossroads. The so-called Soldiers of the Sea have been fighting on land for a decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Corps' amphibious troop carrier has just been cancelled, its new fighter jet postponed.
NPR: What should the Marine Corps look like in the 21st century?
TOM BOWMAN: The Marine Corps has made a name for itself storming beaches. Places like the Barbary Coast and Veracruz, Iwo Jima and Incheon.
LOREN THOMPSON, Host:
For many years now, its core mission has been forcible entry, meaning going ashore in the face of hostile fire to claim enemy beaches and then push inland quickly before defenders regain their balance.
BOWMAN: Gates stopped the Marines from going ahead with their Joint Strike Fighter, a stealthy warplane. And Gates canceled the Marines' amphibious troop carrier, known as the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle or just EFV.
ROBERT GATES: The EFV originally conceived during the Reagan administration, has already consumed more than $3 billion to develop, and will cost another $12 billion to build.
BOWMAN: And Loren Thompson says that raises questions about the relevance of the Marines.
THOMPSON: If the Marine Corps is no longer going to do opposed landing on enemy beaches in the face of hostile fire, then its role will be significantly diminished in the future.
BOWMAN: The Marines publicly dismiss talk they're becoming less relevant, and say that attacking enemy beaches is just one of their jobs. Their senior officer, General Jim Amos, said recently they've been busier than ever.
JIM AMOS: Since 9/11, U.S. amphibious forces have responded to crises and contingencies at least 50 times, a response rate more than double during the entire period of the Cold War.
BOWMAN: The ability for Marines to float offshore and quickly repsnd, says retired Marine General Chuck Krulak, offers any president a way to influence events.
CHUCK KRULAK: They can remain over the horizon, they can come on to the horizon and be seen and increase the pressure, or they can come ashore.
BOWMAN: And that physical presence, Krulak argues, cannot be replaced by high- tech weapons.
KRULAK: A B-2 bomber flying at 60,000 feet is not a presence, it's nothing more than contrails in the sky.
BOWMAN: The Marines may argue they're irreplaceable. But Defense Secretary Gates has suggested cutting their numbers and not just their weapons. Gates wants to reduce the Corps by some 15,000 to 20,000 in the coming years. Defense analyst Gordon Adams says that's a higher proportion than the cuts Gates has called for in the Army.
GORDON ADAMS: My view would be that the Army deserves to be significantly cut rather than the Marine Corps.
BOWMAN: Adams worked on Pentagon budgets in the Clinton administration and thinks Gates' cuts are ill-conceived.
ADAMS: His decisions have by and large been driven by technology, cost and efficiency.
BOWMAN: Tom Bowman, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Eric Westervelt paid a visit to the town of Sidi Bouzid, where the first protests occurred.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
ERIC WESTERVELT: It's a sunny weekday afternoon and dozens of young men, almost all in their 20s, play cards, sip tea and smoke at a dingy no-name cafe on the outskirts of Sidi Bouzid. A faded poster of Brooke Shields hangs on the wall. Most of these men here have university degrees. They are all unemployed.
(SOUNDBITE OF CONVERSATIONS)
WESTERVELT: Twenty-nine-year-old Taoufik Hamdouni sits with his friends, as he does most every day. His hair is trimmed and neat. His, shirt pressed and clean, as if he's dressed for a job interview that never seems to come. Hamdouni graduated from college nearly seven years ago with a civil engineering degree. He's been jobless ever since.
TAOUFIK HAMDOUNI: (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Unidentified Man #1: (Singing in foreign language)
WESTERVELT: Unidentified Man #2: Ah, hey.
WESTERVELT: The 26-year-old even searched outside Tunisia for work. But he was asked to pay about $5,000 to a job broker - almost five months' pay for his father, a schoolteacher.
MARWAN CHOKRI: (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Hamdouni has four brothers and three sisters. All have university degrees. Only one of them has a job, a brother who works as an elementary school teacher.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHILD)
HAMDOUNI: (Foreign language spoken)
WESTERVELT: Eric Goldstein is deputy director of Human Rights Watch for North Africa and the Middle East.
ERIC GOLDSEIN: It really is about jobs for them and the resentment that people in other parts of the country seem to be part of this Tunisia that everybody talks of as being a middle class country, you know, well-educated, moderate, open to the world, and they're back there struggling every day.
WESTERVELT: So an urgent issue - among the many any new Tunisian government has to face - is economic development in the rural hinterlands.
WESTERVELT: Eric Westervelt, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Many of you may know this tune.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAME, "ANGRY BIRDS")
NORRIS: Gigi Douban reports.
GIGI DOUBAN: Whenever Chris Clark fires up his iPhone or iPad, he's on autopilot. His fingers invariably go to the same place, to the game folder containing the "Angry Birds" app.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAME, "ANGRY BIRDS")
DOUBAN: Clark, an industrial electronics repairman from Birmingham, Alabama, says he plays "Angry Birds" during downtime at work, on the sofa, waiting in line and, well, just about anytime he can. In other words, he's addicted.
CHRIS CLARK: You keep retrying the harder levels until you get it, and then you're like, OK, next. Next. Come on. Come on. And you just keep going, and you stop when somebody yells, dinner, or it's time to go to work.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
DOUBAN: Part of what makes it so addictive, Clark says, is that it's easy. You basically hurl birds through a slingshot at a castle. Inside the castle are these ugly green pigs.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAME, "ANGRY BIRDS")
DOUBAN: They stole the birds' eggs. So the object of the game is revenge. That's something a lot of people can relish in, but so is the simple pleasure of breaking things.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAME, "ANGRY BIRDS")
DOUBAN: Mattel knows this. Just ask Raymond Adler, the company's marketing manager for games and puzzles.
RAYMOND ADLER: People love building things so that they can go and knock them down.
DOUBAN: So Mattel is putting the finishing touches on an "Angry Birds" board game due to hit store shelves in May. It'll sell for about $15.
ADLER: This is sort of our first venture into bringing things from the digital space into the physical space.
DOUBAN: Adler says Mattel still sells tons of board games, but there's a lot more competition out there. Games played on computers, mobile devices and all sorts of gadgets take away market share from Mattel.
ADLER: Some of the ways that we're trying to combat that is exactly with things like "Angry Birds."
DOUBAN: True to the digital game, there will be a slingshot.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAME, "ANGRY BIRDS")
DOUBAN: Only in the board game version, and this may come as a disappointment to some, the birds will not come apart and explode on impact with the castle, which players build out of blocks.
ADLER: No. The birds stay in one piece so that you can play over and over again.
DOUBAN: And Mattel hopes people do. The company wouldn't say how much it invested in the "Angry Birds" board game, but analysts say it can't be much. After all, Rovio, the company that developed the "Angry Birds" app, pretty much provided the framework.
PAUL SWINAND: They don't have to go out and develop a whole lot of intellectual property to create a new board game.
DOUBAN: That's Paul Swinand, an analyst with Morningstar.
SWINAND: If it's not a success, it's not going to be a black eye or probably even a loss for them because they probably have very good margins on it.
DOUBAN: Still, even Adler says it's pretty unlikely that the "Angry Birds" board game will ever outsell toys like Barbies and Matchbox cars. But, Adler says, you just never know, and as big as "Angry Birds" is, he says, it's definitely a risk worth taking.
(SOUNDBITE OF GAME, "ANGRY BIRDS")
DOUBAN: For NPR News, I'm Gigi Douban in Birmingham, Alabama.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
As Michigan Radio's Tracy Samilton reports, LaHood isn't the only one concerned about so many new high-tech distractions.
TRACY SAMILTON: Let's say you're driving and there's a kid in the back seat crying. That's distracting. If you remember "The Ed Sullivan Show," you can think of that as one plate spinning on top of a pole.
(SOUNDBITE OF CIRCUS MUSIC AND APPLAUSE)
SAMILTON: Let's say you're also late. That's another spinning plate. You're checking a map on your GPS for directions, and traffic is getting heavy: plate, plate. And if you get too many things going at once, those plates will start to fall.
PAUL GREEN: If your eyes are off the road, and your hands are off the wheel, that's a problem. And if your brain is engaged somewhere else, it makes it even worse.
SAMILTON: David Champion of Consumer Reports says this system and others like it are too distracting.
DAVID CHAMPION: Actually, Ford now, I believe are having a tutorial that they put drivers through before they buy the car, which is ridiculous, really.
SAMILTON: Unidentified Voice: Playing Song "Carve Your Name."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CARVE YOUR NAME")
SAMILTON: So it heard you wrong.
DAVE SULLIVAN: It did not recognize the words "Back Door Man," which is a Sarah McLaughlin song. Instead it's playing "Carve Your Name" by the Nadas, a small Iowa band.
SAMILTON: Adrian Lund is President of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
ADRIAN LUND: People were distracted before, and they're still distracted, they're just distracted by different things, and they're crashing for slightly different reasons. More of them are cell phones, rather than changing a CD.
SAMILTON: For NPR News, I'm Tracy Samilton in Ann Arbor.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR national political correspondent Don Gonyea is already in Wisconsin. He has this report.
DON GONYEA: The lunchtime crowd at American Legion Post 82 in Port Washington is having some fun with President Obama's loyalty to the Chicago Bears, the team the Green Bay Packers eliminated on Sunday. 62-year-old Todd Brown notes that the president was planning a trip to the Super Bowl if the Bears made it.
TODD BROWN: How come he's not going to come 'cause the Packers won? That's my question. But he represents the United States. He doesn't just represent Chicago.
GONYEA: Football aside, Brown agreed to talk politics for just a bit. He says he's an Independent who leans Democratic, but who did not vote for President Obama two years ago. And he says he feels pretty good about the state of the economy.
BROWN: Well, no, as long as it keeps growing, it's OK. As long as it keeps growing, it's OK.
GONYEA: Tonight he says he simply wants to hear how Mr. Obama will keep the economy growing at what he sees as a slow but steady rate. Brown also says he's pleased with the Republican gains in Congress.
BROWN: Well, it's a check and balance, yeah. It's check and balance.
(SOUNDBITE OF LUNCH ROOM)
FRANK WALLACE: And I'm going to have two brats with fried onions.
NORRIS: I don't have brats today.
WALLACE: Unidentified Woman: Meatloaf and mashed potatoes is our specialty every day.
WALLACE: I'm leaving. I'm leaving. No, give me...
GONYEA: That's Frank Wallace ordering his lunch at the American Legion Hall. He says he's semi-retired but runs his own construction business. He's a Republican. He says he'll be watching tonight's speech and looking to see if the president has indeed gotten the message that voters sent in November.
WALLACE: Whether you like him or not, I didn't vote for him and I wouldn't vote for him again in two years, no matter what, but I would at least give him some credit if I saw him making some of those, you know, centrist moves.
GONYEA: Wallace is just as interested that a congressman from Wisconsin, Paul Ryan, who chairs the House Budget Committee, has been selected by Republicans to deliver the official response to the State of the Union.
WALLACE: If there's anything in the original State of the Union address that is based on funny money or based on goofy numbers, he'll be able to point that out and he'll know that.
GONYEA: Jean Kittelson is the president of the local city council. Her office is officially nonpartisan. She won't say who she voted for in '08. I asked her about the president.
JEAN KITTELSON: I think he's doing fine. The president has a tough job. It's tough.
GONYEA: As for what Kittelson wants to hear from Mr. Obama tonight?
KITTELSON: I want to hear a message of hope. I want to hear a message of optimism that our economy will turn around, that jobs will be created and keep things positive, keep the hope going.
GONYEA: Don Gonyea, NPR News, Milwaukee.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Tyeis Baker-Baumann is president of Rebsco, Incorporated - that's a manufacturing and construction business based in Greenville, Ohio. Welcome to the program.
TYEIS BAKER: Thank you.
NORRIS: And we also have Lowell Miles. He's the CEO of Miles Fiberglass and Composites. And that's based in Portland, Oregon. And Mr. Miles, welcome to you too.
LOWELL MILES: Thank you.
NORRIS: Question to begin for both of you. What do you both want to hear tonight, especially on this issue of jobs and competitiveness? And Ms. Baker- Baumann, I'm going to begin with you.
BAKER: OK. What I would like to hear is that they are going to be spending some time at the federal level really listening to the day-to-day real concerns of small businesses. The things that we know from our daily experience really inhibit our ability to create jobs and to grow our businesses. Things like taxation, burdensome regulations and increasing costs with health care - those types of things.
NORRIS: And Mr. Miles, what are you going to be listening for?
MILES: Well, I'm concerned about inflation and I'd like to hear some assurance that we have something in place to keep raw materials from increasing and to keep inflation from really running away. I'm very concerned about that.
NORRIS: The president has said that jobs creation is going to be a top priority for him. But he has also said that there's only so much that he can do to control the levers of the economy. What specifically can the government do to deal with the jobs crisis and create an environment where it's easier for you to add jobs to your payrolls?
MILES: One thing I think is to, you know, there's some concern about the unions being able to organize without having a vote of the employees. That certainly could affect us in terms of our costs and being able to be competitive. I think the other thing is the cost of energy. If that goes up appreciatively, it's going to affect whether we're going to be able to be competitive with overseas competition and even competition within the United States, depending on who has the cheapest energy to use.
BAKER: And as a business owner, you only have so much money to work with. It's just like having households. You only - you have a budget. And when you don't know what's coming down the pike, you may decide that you're going to hang onto those dollars because you may need those dollars to be compliant, versus using those dollars to generate economic opportunities in your community or in your business, which therefore would then create employment opportunities for the people in your community.
NORRIS: If you were handing out letter grades to the president from a business person's perspective, what letter grade would you give him?
MILES: I would give him an F.
NORRIS: An F?
MILES: Yes.
NORRIS: F stands for failure, usually.
MILES: So far, yes.
NORRIS: He's not done enough to grow the economy, in your eyes?
MILES: Not for small business.
NORRIS: And Ms. Baker-Baumann?
BAKER: I would probably - I'd be a little bit more generous. I'd probably give him a D.
NORRIS: A little more generous. Not much, though.
BAKER: Not much.
NORRIS: So, he's going to - he has some pace to go in trying to convince you that he can turn things around and help grow the economy.
BAKER: And is sincerely appreciative of the role that small businesses - that business in general play in creating a vital nation.
MILES: Yes, I think there's a real disconnect between what small business really does and how it operates and I think if he would make more effort in finding out what that disconnect is, it would be very helpful.
NORRIS: Is there a concern that he's focused more on big corporations or larger manufacturers and not smaller businesses?
MILES: That's my belief, yes.
NORRIS: Well, Ms. Baker-Baumann and Mr. Miles, thank you very much for your time. All the best to both of you.
BAKER: Thank you.
MILES: Thank you.
NORRIS: And Tyeis Baker-Baumann is president of Rebsco Incorporated. That's a manufacturing and construction business. And that business is based in Greenville, Ohio.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Rachel Martin talked with several military historians about why that's not likely to happen.
RACHEL MARTIN: Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall, cue the soundtrack.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARTIN: Pete Hegseth and Wade Zirkle wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal earlier this month saying Petraeus deserves a fifth star for leading the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past eight years. Historians say that's just not going to happen.
ROBERT SCALES: That's no reflection on the competence of Dave Petraeus or on the success that he's had, or for that matter, on the regard that the American people hold for him. The difference has to do with the scale.
MARTIN: That's retired Army general and military historian Robert Scales. He says World War II was a war fought for the survival of the nation. Eliot Cohen, professor of security studies at Johns Hopkins University, sees it the same way.
ELIOT COHEN: When everyone thinks about Iraq and Afghanistan, they are not the pivotal conflicts of our nation's history.
MARTIN: The U.S. five-star rank equalized things. Another reason, says Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, is the symbolism.
MICHAEL O: A way of giving the military, which had fought so hard, one more boost of support to say that the nation knew that what was being asked of the military at that point was unusual in the extreme. And one way to honor all the troops was to give their commanders this potential fifth star.
MARTIN: Again, Eliot Cohen.
COHEN: People began to feel guilty that General Pershing, the commander of World War I, who had been the mentor to a number of these people, wasn't made a five star, so they kind of retroactively gave him a fifth star. And then, of course, how could Ulysses S. Grant, how could he not be a five star. And then, my gosh, what do we do with George Washington?
MARTIN: Well, you obviously have to give him a fifth star, too. And that happened in 1976. Still, Eliot Cohen says there's almost something un-American about putting military leaders too high on a pedestal.
COHEN: Deep in our historical memory is the idea of George Washington receiving this commission from Congress and at the end of the revolution, he hands the commission back.
MARTIN: Rachel Martin, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
NPR's Dina Temple-Raston was in the Manhattan courtroom for sentencing today. And, Dina, what was the scene today?
DINA TEMPLE: And during most of the courtroom session, which went on for about three hours, he sat with his hands gripping the edge of the defense table. And the victims came up from the benches in the back, one by one, and addressed Ghailani directly, talking about who had they had lost what they'd experienced back in August 1998 when those bombings happened. And Ghailani never really turned back to look at them.
BLOCK: And what did the judge say when he read out this sentence?
TEMPLE: Well, Ghailani stood up with his lawyers and the judge said that he was going to be sentenced to life in prison. And the judge said, actually without parole - life means life. And Ghailani just bowed his head and managed to smile to his defense team. And that was about it.
G: Terrorism, pure and simple. And he said that he had to provide a sentence that made crystal clear that terrorism has serious consequences, and that's why it was such a harsh sentence.
BLOCK: Now, Dina, last year, the jury in this case had acquitted Ahmed Ghailani of more than 200 other charges. He was convicted on just this one conspiracy count. And some at the time saw that as a prime example of why these cases should be kept out of civilian court. Does this maximum life sentence change that debate?
TEMPLE: Well, right now, even with this tough sentence, that's a hard sell. The idea was that the jury had only convicted him on one count, and therefore juries are unpredictable and they don't want that for Guantanamo detainees - critics say no. Republicans are against bringing any detainees to the U.S. for trial, and Congress has actually passed legislation that basically won't pay for criminal - civilian trials for Guantanamo detainees. And that's really tied the administration's hands.
BLOCK: So what happens now then to the detainees who are still at Guantanamo?
TEMPLE: And then, on top of that, we also expect that there's going to be some sort of announcement about military-like trials, military commissions is what they call them, that they'll actually give the go ahead to get those going again. And those had sort of been stopped while the Obama administration was looking at how it could close Guantanamo.
BLOCK: Okay, NPR's Dina Temple-Raston in New York. Dina, thank you.
TEMPLE: You're very welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Steve Zeitchik is in Park City, Utah, racing from theater to theater as a film writer for the L.A. Times. And he joins us now to tell us about what he's seen and what he can't wait to see. Steve, welcome back to the program.
STEVE ZEITCHIK: Thank you very much.
NORRIS: Let's start with documentaries, if you don't mind. There are a number of very strong films have already premiered. Can you walk us through what you think might be most promising?
ZEITCHIK: Oprah Winfrey has purchased it. She's going to air it on her network, and it's another one of these films that everybody's talking about here.
NORRIS: One other film I want to ask you about that everyone seems to be talking about and is getting a lot of buzz is the bio about the puppeteer behind the "Sesame Street" character Elmo.
ZEITCHIK: So really a good spectrum of docs.
NORRIS: Any documentaries or films that sort of take on stories that are front and center in the news and might really take off out of the festival simply because of that?
ZEITCHIK: And to that, he actually asked these big brands, the Hyatts of the world and the JetBlues, to actually sponsor his movie. So it's a movie critiquing product placement that's sponsored by product placement, and I think because marketing is so omnipresent in our lives, I think that's a movie that's going to be a big hit.
NORRIS: The festival offers an enormous platform for very small movies. We certainly saw that with a film like "Winter's Bone," which received some nominations today. It premiered there last year. Is there a "Winter's Bone" that seems to be emerging this year, a film that everyone's talking about that's going to get, you know, enough sort of wind in its sails that it'll move out of the festival and perhaps do great things?
ZEITCHIK: So we'll see if there's another "Winter's Bone" in the mix, but certainly "Like Crazy" is the one to watch.
NORRIS: Steve Zeitchik, good to talk to you.
ZEITCHIK: Same here. Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: That's Steve Zeitchik. He writes about film for the L.A. Times.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And our movie critic Bob Mondello is here to talk us through them. Hey, Bob.
BOB MONDELLO: Hey.
BLOCK: A Pixar animated film, it's about a one-eyed, gun-toting ballet-dancer with a stutter who flees her lesbian parents and gets trapped in a deep chasm in the Ozarks. Now she's one-armed and one-eyed, and she dreams within a dream that she's created a new social networking site for washed-up boxers. What do you think?
MONDELLO: The public will eat it up. That's all 10 of the pictures of Best Picture this year.
BLOCK: There you go.
MONDELLO: Let me see if I can do them in the pitch's order. That would be "Toy Story 3," "True Grit," "Black Swan," "The King's Speech," "The Kids Are All Right," "127 Hours," "Winter's Bone," "Inception," "Social Network" and "The Fighter."
BLOCK: And, Bob, what do you make of that list?
MONDELLO: Well, it's a pretty predictable bunch of nominations. There aren't any real surprises. My 10 Best list had nine of the 10, although I cheat a little bit because I have, like, 22 picture.
BLOCK: Yes, you do. You have a very long list. But we always love surprises or controversies in Oscar nominations. None this year?
MONDELLO: There is some fuss going the other way, that "Inception's" director, Chris Nolan, was not nominated. That'll probably get him a consolation prize for original screenplay.
BLOCK: What about in the acting categories, Bob? Any surprises there?
MONDELLO: If I were guessing, I'd say Natalie Portman's ballet dancer will end up winning Best Actress. Christian Bale has a lock on Best Supporting Actor for his drug- addicted brother in "The Fighter," and the one category that's harder to predict because the people in it are not very famous is Best Supporting Actress.
BLOCK: And Bob, we don't have time to talk through every category, even though we might like to. But final thoughts on this year's nominees?
MONDELLO: It's why the Academy likes the Oscars to come last, after all the critics have given their awards, after the Golden Globes, after all that. It's as if they're saying, well, okay, the kids get to play, and now the grownups are going to come in, and we're going to tell you what's actually what.
BLOCK: Okay, our movie critic Bob Mondello. Thanks so much.
MONDELLO: It's always a pleasure.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
But as NPR's April Fulton reports, some experts say the new labels might be more confusing than helpful.
APRIL FULTON: Kelly Brownell runs the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. He says people won't know what to make of all these boxes.
KELLY BROWNELL: Research has shown that the typical person lingers over a particular food item for only about three seconds, so to expect them to make use of a lot of symbols, I think, is wishful thinking.
FULTON: Scott Faber of the Grocery Manufacturers Association helped developed the food labels. He says consumers want nutrition information, but they want both the good and the bad, and they want specific numbers in the boxes, because they don't want to be told what to eat.
SCOTT FABER: It's not our place or government's place to tell them how a particular food fits into their diets.
FULTON: April Fulton, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Unidentified Man: The new 99-cent beefy crunch burrito, the crunch of flaming hot Fritos chips, seasoned beef and nacho cheese sauce.
(SOUNDBITE OF TACO BELL AD)
NORRIS: But a new class action lawsuit says that the seasoned beef Taco Bell uses in many of its menu items doesn't contain enough meat, just under 35 percent, to legally call it ground beef.
B: Dee Miles of the firm Beasley, Allen, Crow, Methvin, Portis & Miles. And Mr. Miles, thank you very much for being with us.
DEE MILES: Thank you for having me.
NORRIS: And if you're right and there is only 35 percent actual beef in Taco Bell's seasoned beef, what makes up the other 65 percent?
MILES: Well, those are the items that are listed in the lawsuit. It's things like soybeans and wheat and oats, non-meat products. There are things I can't even pronounce and don't know what they are, but they are non-beef products or non-meat products, and so you have basically almost 65 percent of this beef product being something other than beef.
NORRIS: How did this case come to you?
MILES: Well, the United States government refers to beef as being 70 percent beef and 30 percent fat, that's the minimum requirement for beef. And it's clear that Taco Bell's product is not that. So to call it beef is a misrepresentation.
NORRIS: Now, isn't there some leeway if they actually call it taco filling or something like that under those USDA requirements?
MILES: That's correct, but they don't call it that. They call it that internally. You're exactly correct. There is a 40 percent requirement that the product be beef or flesh from the cow in order for it to be called taco meat filling. However, under our analysis of the product, the Taco Bell product, at least the beef products, we're not even reaching the 40 percent. It's about 35 percent.
NORRIS: To that you say what?
MILES: I say that I have the facts. We actually tested the beef before we filed a lawsuit. This wasn't filed on an allegation. And their statement does not address the issue. If it is not beef product, and if it not 70 percent beef and 30 percent fat, you cannot call it beef. And if you do, you're in violation of the federal government rules and standards.
NORRIS: So is this a - are you taking issue with the way that they are labeling the product, or ultimately, do you want them to change what they serve in their restaurants?
MILES: What the lawsuit seeks to do is two things: One, label your product correctly. If it's taco meat filling, then call it that. And secondly, the way you advertise your product, if you can't call it beef if it doesn't meet that definition, and if you're not going to do those things on your own, that's what the lawsuit does, it requests injunctive relief, which basically means Taco Bell, if you're not going to make these changes, we're going to ask a court to impose these changes on your practices.
NORRIS: Mr. Miles, thank you very much for speaking with us.
MILES: Thank you.
NORRIS: And that was Dee Miles. He's one of the attorneys pursuing a class action lawsuit against Taco Bell. At issue is whether or not the fast food chain's seasoned beef can legally be called beef.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Unidentified Group: (Shouting in foreign language)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Unidentified Group: (Chanting in foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: Unidentified Group: (Chanting in foreign language)
SARHADDI NELSON: For many hours, that order didn't come. Protestors were free to march, which is rarely allowed here. They filled major streets and stopped traffic with the support of many drivers, like this cab driver.
(SOUNDBITE OF HONKING HORN)
SARHADDI NELSON: First-time protestor Adel al Sharif said he decided to march because of the popular uprising in Tunisia earlier this month. The father of three says he and others here want political and economic freedom.
ADEL AL SHARIF: This is the exact thing that moves everybody. The status quo is too much, too much not doing anything or not progressing my children are growing I don't know how to tell them that we've been living like this for ages. So we need this changed.
SARHADDI NELSON: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Cairo.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Rami Khouri joins me now from Beirut. He's a columnist with the Daily Star in Lebanon. Welcome to the program.
RAMI KHOURI: Thank you.
BLOCK: We've heard Najib Mikati billing himself as a consensus candidate. What can you tell us about his connections with Hezbollah, who backed him as prime minister, his ties with Syria, say, or Iran?
KHOURI: The reason he was chosen is precisely because he comes, you know, right down the middle. He's a kid of Gerry Ford figure, in a way, in American terms. He is seen to be somebody who can bring together the fighting or feuding Lebanese groups.
BLOCK: If the new prime minister is this right-down-the-middle figure that you describe, why have there been chants at the protest today among Sunnis saying Sunni blood is boiling?
KHOURI: Well, first of all, the expression blood is boiling is really rhetorical, the equivalent of somebody in the United States saying I'm mad as hell, or I'm going to kick his ass or something like that. These are rhetorical expressions. So when you translate it into English, it sounds like really something terrible. But when you say that (foreign language spoken), it means your blood is boiling, it just means you're really angry.
BLOCK: Well, why are they angry?
KHOURI: But the tendency to resolve these conflicts and prevent fighting clearly for several years has been greater than the tendency to give in to these impulses and get out on the street and start shooting each other and fighting, and I think that's going to prevail.
BLOCK: There is, though, another hot-button issue, and that has to do with the U.N. tribunal's investigation into the killing of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. There are sealed indictments in that case, and they're expected to name members of Hezbollah. So what has the new prime minister, Najib Mikati, said about that? If he has the backing of Hezbollah, would you assume that he has agreed to cut ties with the tribunal?
KHOURI: So I think his sense is that you have to find a middle ground, where the tribunal can perhaps continue its work, but to disassociate it from the direct association and structural involvement of the Lebanese government, that's the path that Mikati has to try to walk.
BLOCK: Rami Khouri, thanks very much for talking with us.
KHOURI: Thank you for having me.
BLOCK: Rami Khouri is director of the Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He's also a columnist with the Daily Star in Lebanon.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Here's Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
ERIC CANTOR: If you think the government didn't spend enough money in 2008, then oppose this resolution. Go on record for more spending, more borrowing and more debt.
BLOCK: NPR's Audie Cornish reports from Capitol Hill.
AUDIE CORNISH: Now, this was non-binding, so the resolution itself doesn't cut anything. It just promises that Republican Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan will limit the amount of money Congress allocates this year to government agencies and programs. It doesn't apply to spending on Defense, Security or Veterans.
DAVID DREIER: It is literally a one-sentence measure, a one-sentence measure, which says that our goal is to get to 2008 levels of spending or less.
JAMES MCGOVERN: I thank the gentleman...
DRIER: And I thank my friend for his...
MCGOVERN: Unidentified Woman: Gentlemen, (unintelligible).
MCGOVERN: I appreciate the brevity of the bill, but that doesn't mean the bill doesn't have a very negative impact.
CORNISH: McGovern needled Republicans about why the resolution doesn't say precisely how much will be cut and from which programs. And it doesn't guarantee the GOP campaign pledge to cut $100 billion this fiscal year.
MCGOVERN: I suspect, Madam Speaker, that's because Republican majority is discovering that it's a lot harder to walk the walk than it is to talk the talk. They're realizing that when you start trying to make those kinds of cuts, you start seriously affecting the American economy and the American people.
CORNISH: Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said handing the job to the GOP budget chairman isn't the answer.
STENY HOYER: It simply gives to one person the ability to set that number. It's not only unprecedented, it, in my opinion, is undemocratic with a small D.
PAUL RYAN: I'm enjoying sort of the hyperbolic rhetoric we're hearing here today about one person, one committee, one man dictating and all these things.
CORNISH: That's Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan.
RYAN: This is a first step in a long process. This is a minimal, small down payment on a necessary process to go forward so that we can leave our kids with a better generation, so we can get this debt under control, so the spending spigot can close.
CORNISH: Audie Cornish, NPR News, the Capitol.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And, Nina, Chief Justice Roberts has attended every State of the Union since his appointment in 2005. Remind us why we thought that perhaps he might not attend tonight.
NINA TOTENBERG: The chief justice then, a few days later, characterized the event as a public hazing in which members of the Court, according to protocol, have to sit there expressionless, surrounded by members of Congress cheering and hollering. And that did seem to be a signal that at least he would not attend again. But the Tucson shooting, I suspect, changed his view.
NORRIS: And why do you suspect that?
TOTENBERG: Because the chief justice is a pretty political guy, not in the partisan sense, but in the sense of understanding the politics, the national politics of the moment, which are to show a united front and alleviate, not aggravate divisions.
NORRIS: So which justices will be there besides Roberts?
TOTENBERG: Alito is out of town. Scalia has not attended since 1997 and Thomas rarely attends. And I just have to tell you, Michele, the truth is that Supreme Court attendance is often spotty, even non-existent. Justice Breyer is the only one who really thinks that going is an important statement. And sometimes, he's the only justice there. I think four times, and indeed, in 2000 when he was sick, none of the justices went.
NORRIS: Nina, on another matter, I understand that Justice Scalia gave a lecture on the Constitution last night to the Tea Party Caucus on Capitol Hill, sparking cries of partisanship.
TOTENBERG: Well, whatever controversy there was frankly fizzled when the Tea Party folks invited Democrats to participate, and when legal ethics experts said there was nothing wrong in his appearance, especially since Scalia talks to the ACLU as well.
NORRIS: And there's other news as well about Justice Clarence Thomas. He's gotten himself in a bit of a mess over financial disclosure forms he's required to file.
TOTENBERG: Well, it turns out that he has not, for 13 years, disclosed his wife's income source as required, including nearly $700,000 from the conservative Heritage Foundation over a four-year period. When these omissions were disclosed by common cause over the weekend, Thomas filed amendments to the disclosure forms, saying that it had been a misunderstanding of the regulation.
NORRIS: Thank you, Nina.
TOTENBERG: Thank you.
NORRIS: That's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Unidentified Woman: Hey, what are you doing?
ERIN CLUNE: Before I address the issues that confront us, I'd like to salute some heroes here tonight. Brother Joe, stand up.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
CLUNE: Apart from the loss of jobs, health care has been an issue in this great family of ours. People, why are there never any Band-Aids in the upstairs closet? I know we can and will do better in the future.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
CLUNE: Unidentified Child #1: You lie.
CLUNE: Unidentified Child #1: Mom.
CLUNE: Unidentified Child #2: Yeah, mom.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
BLOCK: Erin Clune is a producer for the Public Radio program "To the Best of Our Knowledge" in Madison, Wisconsin.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
NPR's Greg Allen reports on what kind of travel and what kind of travelers will be allowed.
GREG ALLEN: Armando Garcia says that dramatically changed Cuba travel.
ARMANDO GARCIA: The amount of Cuban-Americans traveling to visit relatives has increased tremendously.
ALLEN: Garcia heads Marazul Charters, a company that operates eight flights a week from Miami to Cuba. Since those rules went into effect, the number of Americans traveling to the island has tripled, to more than 300,000. The new regulations, Garcia believes, will have a similar impact.
GARCIA: Definitely, it's going to increase tremendously, because there is a lot of interest in travel into Cuba.
ALLEN: But there are many others who have been waiting for restrictions to be eased. Included in this group are members of churches and religious groups. Under Bush administration rules, like most Americans, they could only travel to Cuba after receiving special permission.
PAULA CLAYTON DEMPSEY: It will be easier for churches to go.
ALLEN: Paula Clayton Dempsey is with the Alliance of Baptists in Atlanta. Dempsey says under the new regulations, American churches will now be able to send money directly to religious groups in Cuba, but even more important, she says, they'll be able to visit Cuba's churches.
CLAYTON DEMPSEY: They're so isolated. They need - we all need support. They have a need there, and they tell us that you have the option of sending us money or coming to see us. Please come to see us.
ALLEN: Jose Buscaglia, director of Caribbean studies at the University of Buffalo, says his school is one of the few that was able to keep sending students to Cuba during the Bush years. The new regulations will make those study abroad programs easier to plan and operate. But in recent years, Buscaglia says, Cuban officials stepped up efforts to discourage the kind of free travel and open communication with Cubans many educational programs depend on.
JOSE BUSCAGLIA: They're interested in having more U.S. tourists, but they're not necessarily interested in having people go to Cuba and start looking around harder beyond the gates of hotels.
ALLEN: Just ask Tampa City Councilman Charlie Miranda. Miranda has long been planning a trip back to Cuba for himself and 20 members of his boyhood baseball team. In 1954, his squad, the Cascadian All-Stars, traveled from Tampa to Havana for a series of games against Cuban youngsters. Miranda says he recently received permission from the Obama administration to take his team of old-timers back to Havana for a rematch.
CHARLIE MIRANDA: This will be our last chance. We're all 68 to 70 years old, 65 and so forth. And what we're trying to do is play three games in Havana against individuals, hopefully, our age.
ALLEN: Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Ms. Hill, can you see the Cooper's hawk right now from where you are?
TORI HILL: I can see it. It's sitting on a pillar at the very top of the dome, in the lantern of the Main Reading Room.
BLOCK: Yeah. And I gather it's a female, so I'll call her a she. What's she doing?
HILL: She is just sitting on a perch, looking down at us. And then every so often, she takes a circle swoop around the mural of the figure of Human Understanding, looking down on us.
BLOCK: Well, how did she get in?
HILL: We're not exactly sure. The Library of Congress and the architect of the Capitol are still trying to determine the method of entry, so we can stop it.
BLOCK: Yeah. Well, in the meantime, she's been in there now in the Reading Room for almost a week. What has she been eating?
HILL: Well, she is - has been here since Wednesday afternoon when she was first sighted, and we think that she came not hungry, which made it more difficult for the people trying to capture her. She did also have something to eat on Sunday, so they are hoping that by tomorrow morning, she will be hungry enough to take the bait and be captured.
BLOCK: What did she eat on Sunday?
HILL: She ate frozen quail. Apparently, she has not been interested in any of the live bait that has been placed out. But when they put a frozen quail out, she apparently swooped down, grabbed the quail and made her escape back up to her perch.
BLOCK: So I'm assuming that the frozen quail was put out when the patrons were not in the Reading Room.
HILL: Actually, it was a Sunday, and so the Reading Room was closed, but the bait is not down in the Reading Room. The bird is not in the Reading Room. It stays up in the lantern.
BLOCK: Now, when you say the lantern, you're talking about the uppermost reaches of the Main Reading Room, up by the dome and the area around that.
HILL: Up at the very top of the dome with windows. If you could stand up there, you could see out over Washington.
BLOCK: Well, I'm sure it's a nice thing to have this Cooper's hawk in the Library of Congress, but you must be thinking about how to get her out. What's the plan for what you're going to do about her?
HILL: We have had a master bander from the Raptor Conservancy of Virginia. There will also be tomorrow U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They will have a master falconer. They're going to try to lure the hawk again, probably using some more quail since she seem to really like the quail, and then capture it at the time that she goes for the quail bait.
BLOCK: Well, she's had quite an adventure. What's she doing right now?
HILL: Actually, I can't see her, but I know that she'll be back swooping at us.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
BLOCK: Tori Hill, thanks very much for talking to us and good luck with everything.
HILL: Oh, she is swooping right now.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
HILL: And you're welcome.
BLOCK: Tori Hill is the acting chief of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division at the Library of Congress. We were talking about the female Cooper's hawk who somehow made it into the Main Reading Room there last Wednesday.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
BLOCK: And I'm looking at photos of that hawk perching and soaring high up inside the Library of Congress. They're at npr.org.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The revolution in Tunisia began with one street vendor who set himself on fire out of despair and anger. Many young Tunisians first heard of his story on the Internet, and they then used social media to communicate and organize around their cause. Tunisia has been called the first successful Twitter revolution.
While social media activists are taking notes so too are Arab governments. NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
DEBORAH AMOS: With three million on Facebook and Internet usage up 400 percent in a year, Saudi Arabia has a social media revolution.
(Soundbite of electronic noise)
AMOS: This is the sound of a Twitter feed. The byte-sized comments come in torrents here. Recently, many focused on Tunisia. In fact, Saudi's social media activists spread videos and updates at the peak of the street protests, and the interest has stayed high ever since.
But what now? Will the Saudi government clamp down on this freewheeling speech?
Professor HATOON AL FASSI (History Professor, King Saud University): It's a good question, and I was wondering what or when would we see that effect of Tunisia on us.
AMOS: That's Hatoon Al Fassi, a professor and political activist.
Prof. AL FASSI: Everybody, politically speaking, are on their nerves. They're not happy with anything that goes on in the media. For example, when I wrote my article today, it was refused.
AMOS: Al Fassi felt the chill firsthand when she delivered her weekly newspaper column. She wrote about Arab governments' response to events in Tunisia, and she had to defend the topic to her editor.
Prof. AL FASSI: Everything I've written was actually from the news; I haven't put anything new. Said yes, too, you could put them all together.
AMOS: While Saudi Arabia still controls the domestic media, it's harder to block out international news. But for the first time, the government has published new regulations for the electronic media. Users, including bloggers, are encouraged to register with the government. The rules prohibit criticism of Islam or anything that compromises public order, rules which spurred an outburst of criticism online.
Mr. MOHAMMED QATANI (Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association): I believe this is an ugly tactic of censoring freedom of expression.
AMOS: That's Mohammed Qatani, and he heads the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, an unofficial human-rights group that publishes provocative challenges to the government on a website registered outside the country.
Mr. QATANI: And they do censor our website. Over the past year, it has been blocked more than 15 times. Can you imagine? Almost every two weeks, they will just shut it down. But we figure out how to do it.
AMOS: And that's the thing, says Prince Turki al Faisal, a former diplomat and head of intelligence. It's impossible to clamp down on the Web.
Prince TURKI AL FAISAL (Former Diplomat, Saudi Arabia): If you want to get to a certain website, who can prevent you? You can hook your phone to a provider in Ukraine or Timbuktu. It is not a means to clamp down but rather simply to regulate them.
AMOS: But this week, Human Rights Watch reports that the Saudi government has harassed and jailed critics and warns that the new regulations are likely to suppress electronic communications.
The Human Rights Watch report also notes there's a lively exchange of views on the Saudi Web, and even government officials check on blog sites to monitor what's going on in the kingdom.
(Soundbite of rushing water)
AMOS: This is a YouTube posting of the 2009 floods in Jeddah. More than 70 people died. The government contained the damages after responding to YouTube reports and Facebook groups that were way ahead of local officials in reporting the crisis.
Mr. ROBERT LACEY (Writer): The young Saudis I've spoken to about this plan to get bloggers registered just laugh. There are all sorts of technical ways that I don't quite understand of getting around it and blogging under an assumed name.
AMOS: Robert Lacey has lived in Saudi Arabia for decades and written about the royal family. He says the Internet poses a challenge for this conservative, mostly religious society.
Mr. LACEY: It's one of the big questions ahead for Saudi Arabia, how this authoritarian regime will live with the freedom and chaos that the Internet represents.
AMOS: So far, the social media revolution has been a limited success, but that was before the uprising in Tunisia.
Deborah Amos, NPR News, Riyadh.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Asian-Americans have never been a big enough or cohesive enough fragment of the culture to support a whole TV network like BET or Univision. But now, online video is a vibrant alternative to television.
And that means a fan base of mostly Asian teens is enough to support a new kind of star. Corey Takahashi reports.
COREY TAKAHASHI: At the moment, there's one YouTube celebrity with more subscribers than anyone else, not Lady Gaga, not Justin Bieber, either.
Mr. RYAN HIGA: First things first, I'm not your average teenager...
TAKAHASHI: More than three million fans on YouTube have signed up to receive updates and videos from a college student who was raised in Hilo, Hawaii. His name is Ryan Higa.
Mr. HIGA: As long as I can remember, I've been training to become an ASS, an agent of secret stuff.
TAKAHASHI: Higa's latest 35-minute movie is called "Agents of Secret Stuff." It's an action-comedy set in high school. It features a who's who of YouTube celebrities. The video's clocked well over eight million views in the past two months.
(Soundbite of video)
Unidentified Man #1: You must operate cautiously.
Mr. HIGA: I will not fail.
Unidentified Man #1: Cool, peace out.
TAKAHASHI: A Pasadena-based production house, Wong Fu Productions, directed, co-wrote and co-produced the project with Higa. Philip Wang is a co-founder, and he also acts in the movie.
Mr. PHILIP WANG (Co-Founder, Wong Fu Productions): People, especially through YouTube, they're finding types of entertainment that are just from people that are just like themselves or people that they can relate to a little bit better than, you know, some unattainable movie star or TV star.
And so when they see people like Ryan, or they see people like us, you know, it's someone that they feel a more personal connection to.
TAKAHASHI: Stars like Ryan Higa can earn up to six-figure incomes a year, based on ads YouTube pairs with their videos.
Mr. GEORGE STROMPOLOS: It's not all a Hollywood ecosystem anymore.
TAKAHASHI: George Strompolos used to cultivate online video talent in his former job at YouTube. Now he's working with many of the same stars as a producer in Los Angeles.
Mr. STROMPOLOS: For whatever reason, the studio system is not creating, in this case, Asian-American celebrities. So fans of Ryan have actually elevated him to that level through their own means. In this case, that's through YouTube and through the Internet.
TAKAHASHI: But even Philip Wang of Wong Fu Productions will admit one downside to this newer pathway to stardom.
Mr. WANG: We have lost a little bit of the classy kind of stars, you know, from, you know, the Frank Sinatra or Gene Kelly age.
TAKAHASHI: As Ol' Blue Eyes might say, in the YouTube age, it's even more about doing it my way.
For NPR News, I'm Corey Takahashi.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Scientists have identified a substance that can dramatically improve memory in rats, at least. It's a growth hormone that's produced naturally in rodents and humans.
As NPR's Jon Hamilton reports, the discovery could lead to drugs that affect memories in people.
JON HAMILTON: Most memories are fleeting. That phone number you just saw will be gone in seconds unless you work hard to remember it. But some memories don't disappear.
Dr. CRISTINA ALBERINI (Researcher, Mount Sinai School of Medicine): We are talking about long-term memories. Memories that last for days, weeks, years, even a lifetime.
HAMILTON: Cristina Alberini, a researcher at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, studies these sorts of memories.
To understand how they're formed, Alberini and a team of scientists have been studying rats that get an electric shock when they step into a dark area of their cage.
Dr. ALBERINI: And they learn that that's unpleasant, and they're going to avoid it.
HAMILTON: For a while. Then the unpleasant memory gradually fades away.
Alberini says the time it takes them to forget provides a way to measure the persistence of a memory.
Dr. ALBERINI: Which is, for how long did they avoid this place in which they had this unpleasant experience before?
HAMILTON: The scientists realized that soon after rats got a shock, levels of a hormone called IGF2 increased sharply in a part of the brain called the hippocampus. Before this, scientists had known what IGF did in other parts of the body but they hadn't studied it much in the brain. The increase in the hippocampus led them to suspect that the hormone was somehow involved in turning short-term memories into long-term ones. They confirmed this by reducing the amount of hormone in rats' brains. These rats never learned to avoid the dangerous place.
And Alberini says...
Dr. ALBERINI: When we gave IGF2, we saw that they avoided the place for much, much longer.
HAMILTON: More than twice as long. But the extra hormone only made a difference if the rats got it within a few hours of a shock. Alberini says this suggests there is a critical period in which IGF2 helps form long-term memories. And, she says, the hormone probably plays a similar role in many other species.
Dr. ALBERINI: I think there is a, you know, a number of suggestions here that are very encouraging for thinking that it may work in humans.
HAMILTON: Other scientists are pretty intrigued by the new study.
Professor LI-HUEI TSAI (Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, MIT): Really, really exciting.
HAMILTON: Li-Huei Tsai studies Learning and Memory at MIT. Tsai says the new research could help scientists design a drug that enhances memory in people, perhaps even those with Alzheimer's disease. But she says IGF2 itself may not be a good choice because of things it does outside the brain.
Prof. TSAI: It actually can increase the growth of cancer cells. So, I just hope that people wouldn't think about, you know, injecting IGF2 into themselves or something like that.
HAMILTON: Some researchers are more interested in what the study suggests about eliminating bad memories, like the ones associated with�post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Thomas Insel directs the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the research. He says the new study changes the scientific model of how a frightening experience becomes a long-term memory.
Dr. THOMAS INSEL (Director, National Institute of Mental Health): For understanding that, we're going to have a new player that we have to think about. This is a biochemical step that, frankly, no one had identified before.
HAMILTON: Insel says people with PTSD might benefit from a treatment that reduces the amount of IGF2 in the brain, which could help people get rid of a bad memory.
Dr. INSEL: That actually may be more relevant to this particular paper because this is, after all, looking at a fear or emotional memory. And what happens in PTSD is not that you want to remember, you want to learn to forget.
HAMILTON: And manipulating levels of IGF2 might help them do that. The new study appears in the journal Nature.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Country music legend Charlie Louvin has died. He and his brother Ira found success in the 1950s and '60s as the Louvin Brothers. And they were a huge influence on musicians well beyond country music.
NPR's Joel Rose has this appreciation.
JOEL ROSE: Before their close harmonies influenced The Everly Brothers, The Birds or anyone else, The Louvin Brothers were a gospel act.
(Soundbite of song, "The Family Who Prays")
THE LOUVIN BROTHERS (Musicians): (Singing) The family who prays will never be parted. Their circle in heaven unbroken shall stand.
ROSE: Charlie Louvin told WHYY's FRESH AIR in 2003 that the brothers' vocal style came easily.
(Soundbite of archived interview)
Mr. CHARLIE LOUVIN (Country Music Singer): Us being raised together, if it was obvious that the song was going to get too high for me to sing in a certain place, my brother just automatically take that high lead, and I would do the low harmony. We didn't have to step on each other's foot or wink or bump shoulders to do this. It was just something that you knew was going to happen.
ROSE: Charlie and Ira Loudermilk were born in Alabama.
Country music historian Nolan Porterfield says they drew on the music of their church and on an earlier generation of duet singing.
Mr. NOLAN PORTERFIELD (Country Music Historian): They took from here and there and yon and came up with this just beautiful vocal sound, this harmony. In my estimation, it's never been equaled.
ROSE: While The Louvin Brothers never gave up gospel music, they found their greatest success when they crossed over into mainstream country in 1955.
(Soundbite of song, "When I Stop Dreaming")
THE LOUVIN BROTHERS: (Singing) When I stop dreaming, that's when I'll stop loving you.
ROSE: But gradually, Ira Louvin's drinking and temper drove the brothers apart. They broke up in 1963. And two years later, Ira was killed in a car crash.
Charlie Louvin had some hits on his own, but in the late 1960s, Gram Parsons introduced The Louvin Brothers' music to The Birds and a new generation of fans.
Mr. MARTY STUART (Country Music Singer): He was like one of those Old Testament figures to me. Their songs just almost felt like as if they came out of the hymnbooks, even the country ones.
ROSE: Country singer Marty Stuart played mandolin on Louvin's 2007 comeback album.
Mr. STUART: Just singing alongside him, I went, boy, it is deep in there. He has nuances and he understands the lyrics, and he understands where to put the emotion on top of the lyrics, so he was a master.
ROSE: Even into his 80s, Charlie Louvin kept performing for younger audiences in rock clubs and at the Bonnaroo Music Festival. But for all the shows he played without Ira by his side, Charlie Louvin said he always expected his brother to join him on the choruses.
Mr. LOUVIN: When it comes time for the harmonies to come in, I will move to my left because my brother and I always just use one microphone. And so you had to share the mic. And I - even today, I will move over to the left to give the harmony room. And I know in my mind that there's no harmony standing on my right, but it's just old habits are hard to break.
(Soundbite of song, "Ira")
Mr. LOUVIN: (Singing) Ira, I still hear you off in the distance, your sweet harmony.
ROSE: Charlie Louvin died this morning of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 83 years old.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
(Soundbite of song, "Ira")
Mr. LOUVIN: (Singing) There will never be another, because you can't beat family. I know you're up there singing with the angels.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
This week and next, we're featuring a series of stories about how there's no longer one dominant cultural conversation in the U.S. The explosion of internet outlets and TV channels means it's harder for any one star to get everyone's attention.
Today, NPR's Neda Ulaby reports on one man who's trying to figure out how to dominate across platforms.
NEDA ULABY: Steve Harvey did everything he could to be as famous as someone like Bill Cosby. He hosted "Showtime at the Apollo." He starred in two sitcoms.
(Soundbite of television program)
Unidentified Man #1 (Actor): (As character) Hello, (unintelligible).
Unidentified Man #2 (Actor): (As character) My name ain't no...
ULABY: Harvey has written two New York Times bestselling books, and millions of people have seen him host the game show "Family Feud."
(Soundbite of television program, "Family Feud")
Mr. STEVE HARVEY (Host): Let's clear the board...
ULABY: And Harvey remains a formidable presence on the standup circuit, as seen in the documentary "The Original Kings of Comedy."
(Soundbite of film, "The Original Kings of Comedy")
Mr. HARVEY: I want to be free.
ULABY: But the cornerstone of Steve Harvey's fame today is the nationally syndicated radio and TV show that airs in 64 markets.
(Soundbite of television program)
Mr. HARVEY: Good morning, everybody. You're all listening to the voice. Come on, jig me now, one and only Steve Harvey.
ULABY: Every weekday at dawn, at 5:00 in the morning, Harvey makes a grand entrance at his Atlanta production studio.
Unidentified Woman #1: There he is.
ULABY: His production staff goes a little nuts. It's an office ritual. The makeup artists start a cheer.
Unidentified Women: Give me an E. What's that spell? Steve Harvey.
ULABY: Harvey's show reaches seven million people, but Harvey knows millions more have never heard of him. After the show, he takes an elevator seven stories above the studio to an opulent wood-paneled office with floor-to-ceiling windows. He steeples his fingers and says he wants to leave show business.
Mr. HARVEY: I want my fame, that I've paid for, that it costs me so dearly to have, I want it to pay off.
ULABY: Harvey wants to leverage his fame into entrepreneurship. Men's suits, grocery stores, a dating website, energy-efficient light bulbs. He says it's protection for when people tire of him.
Mr. HARVEY: Throw me off to the side, dish me off like I'm a dishrag, through me in the sink. No, man, uh-uh. I'm wringing this puppy out. We're getting all the moisture out of this fame that's so difficult to acquire and costs so much to attain and maintain. You're not throwing me away.
ULABY: As we talk, Harvey's eyes constantly flick from his heavy carved desk and towards a flat-screen TV. It does nothing but flash the comedian's long-term goals, like - listen to the voice, stay prayerful.
Mr. HARVEY: I want to become one of the premier motivational speakers. I'm going to break out of the entertainment world, become one of the leading businessmen. My yearly income goal is to make 250 million a year. I'm nowhere close to that, but that's the goal.
ULABY: Steve Harvey grew up in the projects, in Cleveland. He's a workaholic who started doing stand-up when he was 27. For years, he ground out gigs in clubs across the United States.
Mr. HARVEY: If you name me the city, I can, without anything, tell you how to get there.
ULABY: Okay. Montgomery, Alabama.
Mr. HARVEY: Man, you take 85 on to Montgomery, you catch 65, and you south to the 10. If you ask me how to get to Kansas, I'm going to tell you from here to take 20, go up to 40, take 40 across until it turns into 70, and you will hit Kansas. Or I can get you to Vermillion, South Dakota from here.
ULABY: But Harvey's had more trouble finding a road map to a multiracial fan base. His sitcom, "The Steve Harvey Show," ran for six years. It got decent ratings, NAACP awards, but it never found Cosby-like traction beyond black audiences.
When he got a book deal based on relationship advice he gives during his show, his publishers tried to keep him in that niche.
Mr. HARVEY: They were convinced at Harper Collins that this was for black women. And when I sent the book in, they were putting stuff in it like: Sisters, let me tell y'all, and black women got to stay together. Whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn't say that. No, no, take all that out.
ULABY: Men are men, and women are women, says Harvey, so his books are for everyone.
Ms. TANYA LADIPO: I think he does a fabulous job of getting people talking.
ULABY: Tanya Ladipo(ph) is a psychotherapist. Her clients are mostly African-American. It surprised her how often her appointments start with the question...
Ms. LADIPO: Did you hear Steve Harvey's show this morning?
ULABY: That's their in, a way to start talking about their problems. Ladipo does not always agree with Harvey's advice but, she says, take him as a comedian, not a mental health professional.
At a moment when relationship success is critical to Steve Harvey's brand, an ex-wife has been publically unhappy about their divorce. On Harvey's show, he discussed his mistakes with his on-air sidekicks.
Mr. HARVEY: I done got it wrong a lot of times. Hey man, I got a divorce. Hey man, I stepped out on my girl.
ULABY: But then Harvey started talking about his upcoming national tour with Kirk Franklin, one of gospel's biggest stars. It's called the "Ain't Nobody Perfect" tour. Harvey promised his co-hosts, and his audience, the tour would make them laugh, not chuckle.
(Soundbite of applause)
Unidentified Woman #2: What's a chuckle, Steve?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Unidentified Woman #2: What's a laugh?
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. HARVEY: Laugh is when you hit the people you roll with.
ULABY: Hitting the people you roll with. In a fragmented media culture, that's pretty much the definition of success.
Neda Ulaby, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
The State of the Union isn't just a speech anymore. It's a social media event, with the White House spreading the president's new message on Twitter, YouTube and more. Of course, the Obama social media operation was a juggernaut during the 2008 campaign.
But as NPR's White House correspondent Ari Shapiro reports, Democrats are no longer in a league of their own.
ARI SHAPIRO: When the Obama campaign was in high gear, the social media operation seemed unstoppable. On Facebook and Twitter, in text messages and on YouTube, there was no comparison between Republicans and Democrats.
So the reality just two years later is striking: In social media, Republicans and their constituents have caught up.
That's the conclusion of a report being released tomorrow by the Pew Research Center. Lee Rainie directs Pew's Internet & American Life Project.
Mr. LEE RAINIE (Director, Internet & American Life Project, Pew Research Center): Lots more people, including Republicans, independents, supporters of the Tea Party, are just as active in this space as Democrats used to be. So the Democratic advantage, in some sense, is being washed away by the mainstreaming of the populations who are using these tools.
SHAPIRO: Being on the inside also makes it tougher for the Obama team to stay ahead of the pack, says Republican digital media consultant Patrick Ruffini.
Mr. PATRICK RUFFINI (Republican Digital Media Consultant): The Internet is a medium for challengers. It's a medium to disrupt the existing power structure. Inherently speaking, a decentralized online movement is going to be frustrating to people who have the power, and, you know, the White House is the very definition of power.
SHAPIRO: There's also a difference between the goals of governing and those of campaigning. A campaign is a black-and-white, us-versus-them fight with a specific endpoint. A presidency is a constant litany of deliberations and compromises.
That can bore, and even alienate, the online base, Ruffini said at a recent example.
Mr. RUFFINI: The DNC sending out emails to, you know, what I would imagine is a fairly liberal base, asking them to support extension of the Bush tax cuts, and I think the people on the receiving end of that must have been wondering, gee, this is not what I signed up for.
SHAPIRO: But even some Democrats think the Obama White House has missed an opportunity to fully capitalize on new media's potential over the last two years.
One social media consultant who worked on the Obama campaign complained that no one in the Democratic Party understands how to use social media, quote, "How sad is it that two years in, all the White House can muster is a postgame Q&A and a policy wonk pop-up video?"
White House officials say their social media strategy is no longer focused just on rallying the base.
Ms. JEN PSAKI (Deputy Communications Director, White House): Many social media tools offer an opportunity to better explain or better provide details of what the president is talking about.
SHAPIRO: White House deputy communications director Jen Psaki says, if Republicans have caught up with Democrats in their use of social media, that's not a bad thing.
Ms. PSAKI: We think it's a great thing for Democrats and Republicans both to use new media and social media tools to better communicate. Washington sometimes seems like an insular place, and this is a way to open up this world.
SHAPIRO: There may also be another reason the Obama team has lost its new media advantage. In 2008, technologies like Facebook and Twitter were relatively new and the Obama campaign adopted them early. Now, everybody's on board.
And Lee Rainie of Pew says in the last two years, there have not been many new technologies for the early adopters to snap up.
Mr. RAINIE: It's not entirely clear - and particularly the newest applications, like location-based applications or even iPad and telephone apps - what the voter tolerance for use of them will be and what the impact on voters might be.
SHAPIRO: Only 5 percent of American adults own iPads. So developing a stellar iPad app may not be the best use of the White House's time.
But in a 2012 presidential campaign, honing the iPad app could just be one more task for the army of volunteers.
Ari Shapiro, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
House Republicans can't force the Senate to act on their bill to repeal the Health Care Law. But now that they're in the majority they can call hearings, lots of them, to rake the measure over the coals. And today, they began the process of doing just that.
NPR's Julie Rovner reports.
JULIE ROVNER: Dave Camp is the new Republican chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. He made it clear that today's session on the economic impact of the health law would be just the first of many.
Representative DAVE CAMP (R-MI, Chairman, Ways and Means Committee): It's my intention to give the American people and employers, both large and small, the opportunity they did not have when this law was being written, to testify in an open hearing about the impact this law will have on them.
ROVNER: Meanwhile, over at the House Budget Committee, Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was making it clear he still thinks the whole law simply has to go.
Representative PAUL RYAN (R-WI, Chairman, Budget Committee): We must reject the notion that a centrally-planned, bureaucratically run health care system can produce more favorable outcomes than the one managed by doctors and patients.
ROVNER: Ryan's hearing featured someone Republicans had been hoping to get at a congressional witness table for months: Richard Foster, the chief actuary of the Medicare program. Republicans elevated Foster to fame last year after he predicted the law would boost overall health spending. Foster repeated that prediction this morning.
Mr. RICHARD FOSTER (Chief Actuary, Medicare): We've estimated that the Affordable Care Act would cause an increase in total national health expenditures in the U.S. The total over the 2010 to 2019 period is estimated to be $311 billion.
ROVNER: Over at the other hearing, Austan Goolsbee was trying to explain how spending could go up even while health care inflation was slowing down. He's President Obama's top economic advisor.
Dr. AUSTAN GOOLSBEE (Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers): The amount of total health spending is different than trying to control health care cost inflation.
ROVNER: Goolsbee says it's because more people will have coverage but they won't need more expensive emergency room care. In fact, insisted Goolsbee, not only will the law help slow health spending, it could also help reduce the unemployment rate.
Dr. GOOLSBEE: I think the evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act may have even a significant positive impact on the job market.
ROVNER: Republicans, however, like Wally Herger of California, found that claim difficult to swallow.
Representative WALLY HERGER (Republican, California): It's one thing to come up with academic arguments for why a particular policy will be good for job creation. It's another thing to have those results actually demonstrated in the real world.
ROVNER: And to prove their point, the GOP brought a couple of real-world small business owners who said they'd been hurt by the law. Scott Womack of Indiana owns a dozen IHOP restaurants. He says starting in 2014, he'll be smacked with having to provide health insurance to all his workers or pay a penalty.
Mr. SCOTT WOMACK (President, Womack Restaurants and IHOP Franchisee): It's not just a marginal cost increase. This is a huge new expense. And at $7,000 annually per employee, it is beyond our ability to pay.
ROVNER: Meanwhile, Joe Olivo, a New Jersey print shop owner, said he won't be able to cope with new paperwork rules.
Mr. JOE OLIVO (President, Perfect Printing): The resources involved to put in place, as far as software programs and calculating and managing receipts are just much more than I have the resources to do.
ROVNER: But both Democrats and Republicans agree that the small business paperwork requirements should be repealed.
Tomorrow, Senate Democrats will launch their own set of hearings, to try to underscore the need for the health law.
Julie Rovner, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. And I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
President Obama took his message about American competitiveness on the road today. First stop, the political battleground of Wisconsin. On the day after his State of the Union speech, where he stressed investments in areas like clean energy, Mr. Obama toured a windmill factory and a firm that makes high efficiency lighting.
He underscored the role, he says, the government can play in helping to make businesses more competitive in the world economy.
NPR's Scott Horsley reports.
SCOTT HORSLEY: There's one competition President Obama probably wants to forget about - Sunday's NFC championship game in which the Green Bay Packers defeated his beloved Chicago Bears. Packer fans were quick to remind the president, though, as soon as he arrived in northeastern Wisconsin.
President BARACK OBAMA: I have already gotten three Green Bay jerseys.
(Soundbite of cheering)
HORSLEY: Mr. OBAMA wished the Packers good luck in the Super Bowl. Many turned to the growing economic competition between the U.S. and fast-growing countries like China and India. He quoted legendary Packers coach Vince Lombardi, saying in this contest, there's no room for second place.
Pres. OBAMA: We've got to up our game. We're going to need to go all in. We're going to need to get serious about winning the future.
HORSLEY: Visiting a renewable power company in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, Mr. Obama repeated one of his main arguments from last night's speech. He says government has a key role to play in the nation's economy. Maybe not the quarterback, more like an offensive lineman opening strategic holes for entrepreneurs to bolt through.
Pres. OBAMA: This company has also been supported over the years not just by the Department of Agriculture and the Small Business Administration, but by tax credits and awards we created to give a leg up to renewable energy companies.
(Soundbite of applause)
Mr. WILLIAM GALSTON (Fellow, Brookings Institution): President Obama believes that government can be a partner in economic growth and job creation.
HORSLEY: William Galston is a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to President Clinton. He says past presidents, including Republicans Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower, have supported government investment in education, innovation and infrastructure. Mr. Obama invoked that tradition in his speech last night.
Pres. OBAMA: America's the nation that built the Transcontinental Railroad, brought electricity to rural communities, constructed the interstate highway system. The jobs created by these projects didn't just come from laying down track or pavement, they came from businesses that opened near a town's new train station or the new off ramp.
HORSLEY: Mr. Obama is no longer talking here about shovel-ready construction projects to provide immediate work. Instead, he's talking about investments where the payoff might be years or decades away. Galston says Mr. Obama can afford that longer perspective now that, in the president's words, he's broken the back of the great recession.
Mr. GALSTON: During the first two years of his administration, Dr. Obama was trying to keep the economic patient from expiring. The tone of the 2011 State of the Union, by contrast, took a much longer view.
HORSLEY: Political analyst Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College says the big challenge for the president will be how to pay for those new investments at the same time, he's promising a five-year freeze in discretionary spending.
Professor JACK PITNEY (Political Analyst, Claremont McKenna College): The president had a problem. On the one hand he wanted an activist government. On the other hand, he recognizes the fiscal problems facing the taxpayer.
HORSLEY: The president may offer more details on how he'd pay for his programs in next month's budget. Meanwhile, Pitney says, congressional Republicans insist what the economy needs is less government.
Prof. PITNEY: One thing you can say for certainty is that we're not going to balance the budget in the next couple of years. And another thing you can say with certainty is that there's going to be a great deal of argument and disagreement about the appropriate size of government.
HORSLEY: The president's State of the Union signaled even with a more Republican Congress, he's not backing away from that debate.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
As President Obama talked about what government can do to boost job growth and American competitiveness, he got some bad news today - the country's finances are in worse shape than previously thought. The Congressional Budget Office forecast a record federal deficit of one and a half trillion dollars for this year.
NPR economics correspondent John Ydstie joins me to talk about the CBO's deficit forecast. And, John, the president last night said the economy is improving. So, how to explain, then, the higher deficit for this year?
JOHN YDSTIE: Well, the big reason is the agreement between the president and Republicans during the lame-duck session of Congress to extend the Bush tax cuts for another two years. The CBO estimates that will reduce tax revenue by about $400 billion next year. And that represents a huge chunk of this projected record deficit.
The CBO did say that those tax cuts are likely to help boost economic growth next year. So they're predicting the deficit will drop some in 2012, but it would remain above a trillion dollars.
NORRIS: John, last night in the State of the Union, the president proposed a five-year freeze on non-security portions of the federal budget to help with the deficit problem. First of all, what is that non-security portion of the budget and how much of a difference will a five-year freeze make in that sector?
YDSTIE: Well, under the administration's definition, the non-security part of the budget includes all discretionary spending except spending on Defense, Homeland Security, the State department and Veterans Affairs. It also excludes entitlements like Medicare and Social Security. So, as the president admitted last night, the freeze only applies to 12 percent of the overall budget.
NORRIS: Right.
YDSTIE: Now, according to the White House, the freeze will save more than $400 billion over 10 years, so around $40 billion a year, but not a lot when you're trying to fight annual budget deficits of more than a trillion dollars.
NORRIS: And another thing, John, the president talked about last night was the expansion of a number of programs including clean energy, high speed rail, all of those would seem to be non-security spending. So, how do you increase spending on those programs under the freeze that he's talking about?
YDSTIE: Well, the president will do it by cutting spending for other programs in the category. This is not an across the board freeze. Every program will not be treated the same. The administration will be prioritizing. So, some programs like high speed rail will get more money and others will get less. And we'll find out more about the tradeoffs when the president unveils his 2012 budget in a couple of weeks.
But the White House says that all of the spending on the jobs and competitiveness programs that the president talked about last night will be done within the context of the freeze and won't increase the deficit.
NORRIS: Now, at the same time the president is talking about this freeze on discretionary spending, Republicans are also talking about budget cuts. How do those compare?
YDSTIE: Well, the Republicans would cut more deeply. The Republican leadership plan is to go back to spending levels in 2008. That would be a 30 percent reduction across the board in the non-security federal spending immediately. Some Republicans, including members of the Republican study group, want to cut even more.
But, again, we're talking about making cuts in a small category of overall government spending. So it's not going to solve the country's deficit problem. That's going to require tackling spending on Medicare, especially, and to a lesser extent, Social Security.
NORRIS: And those perennial third rails of politics.
YDSTIE: Exactly.
NORRIS: Likely to happen?
YDSTIE: Well, the president did say last night and this is a quote, we have to stop pretending that cutting this kind of spending alone, that is, like non-security spending, will be enough. And he made a reference to the work of his deficit commission which outlined some ways to deal with Medicare and Social Security. But he doesn't appear ready to take the first step at this point.
NORRIS: And a lot more work to come in that department.
YDSTIE: Yes.
NORRIS: NPR's economic correspondent John Ydstie, thanks so much.
YDSTIE: You're welcome.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In his State of the Union Address last night, President Obama stressed the importance of education in keeping America competitive and he praised the turnaround effort at one Denver high school.
President BARACK OBAMA: Three years ago, it was rated one of the worst schools in Colorado, located on turf between two rival gangs. But last May, 97 percent of the seniors received their diploma. Most will be the first in their families to go to college.
BLOCK: As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, the makeover of the Bruce Randolph school is still a work in progress.
LARRY ABRAMSON: Just a few years ago, Bruce Randolph Middle School really was one of the worst schools in Colorado. But an ambitious turnaround effort has completely changed the atmosphere. Today, the school has a combined middle and high school focused on getting kids into college. The halls are lined with college banners and awards for academic achievement.
The current principal, Cesar Cedillo, says it's been a tough fight.
Mr. CESAR CEDILLO (Principal, Bruce Randolph High School): It was incredible difficult work. Students were very reluctant to learn. And so we battled with the students. And we stuck together as a staff and we won out.
ABRAMSON: In the speech, the president recounted an incident where a student thanked the previous principal for showing that we are smart and we can make it. Eleventh grader Nomi Rodriguez(ph) says students have a unique and frank relationship with their teachers.
Ms. NOMI RODRIGUEZ: The teachers know how to receive feedback from the students. And, you know, it's not feedback that actually puts down the teacher. It makes the teacher become better at their job.
ABRAMSON: But the experience of this school highlights just how complicated and fragile these turnaround efforts can be. The transformation hinged on giving the staff of Bruce Randolph more autonomy from the central administration of the Denver city schools.
So the president's remarks are a bit of a swipe at big city school systems. Van Schoales, executive director of the think tank Education Reform Now, points out that Bruce Randolph also got a break from the city's teacher's union contract.
Mr. VAN SCHOALES (Executive Director, Education Reform Now): It's certainly a dig at hundred-page contracts that describe every detail in terms of when teachers are supposed to show up, when they're supposed to take their breaks.
ABRAMSON: The Obama administration has frequently butted heads with teachers unions on these kinds of issues, and there will be more fights ahead. For all of its success, the Bruce Randolph school still bears the scars of its rough beginnings. The city still has the school on an academic watch list. While test scores are improving, they are still very low.
Mike Cohen is head of the advocacy group Achieve, Inc. He says that if Bruce Randolph is graduating 97 percent of its college seniors, that's laudable. But he says we need to know another number.
Mr. MIKE COHEN (President, Achieve, Inc.): Not just the percentage of 12th graders who graduate, but the percentage of 9th graders. Because a lot of students who drop out, drop out before they get to their senior year.
ABRAMSON: Like many schools, Bruce Randolph can't say just how many freshmen made it all the way through to graduation, since many transferred to other schools. Many of the school's graduates have been accepted to college. Some, as the president pointed out, may be the first in their families to do so. But most have been accepted to open admission schools, like a community college.
Those schools traditionally have very low graduation rates. So, many of these students will need a lot of special attention for years to come or their experience in college could be short-lived.
Larry Abramson, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
At one point last night, when President Obama was talking about the world economy, he said, the rules have changed. The implication there being that the American education system hasn't changed nearly enough to prepare kids not just for the world as it is, but for the workforce of the future.
President BARACK OBAMA: Meanwhile, nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world. And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science.
NORRIS: Well, we wanted to hear just a bit more about how China, in particular, is adapting its schools. And I spoke earlier with Vivien Stewart. She's a senior adviser for education at Asia Society and I asked her if the president has good reason to be worried.
Ms. VIVIEN STEWART (Senior Adviser of Education, Asia Society): I think we all have good reason to be worried. In terms of the educational expansion in China and India that he spoke of, don't forget that in the 1960s, China had no education. During the Cultural Revolution, schools were closed. But from the 1970s on, they've had a massive expansion of basic education. Nine years of basic education are now universal throughout China.
By the year 2012, 12 years of education will be universal. That means that within, say, five to seven years, China will be graduating a higher proportion of students from high school than we do. And, of course, they have millions more students.
NORRIS: Help me understand the major difference between the education system in the U.S. and, say, China.
Ms. STEWART: China has very high standards, largely focused on math and science, a strong core curriculum that all students have to take. In the U.S., we have standards that vary all over the place, by state and by district. Students can opt out of harder courses. That's one thing.
Secondly, students work extremely hard, very long hours in and out of school. Longer school days, longer school years, lots of time doing homework. Thirdly, I think the teachers - they spend a lot of time recruiting teachers, giving them preferential access to universities. Teachers have some downsides, too. They have a fairly traditional way of teaching, standing from the front of the class, and they're trying to work on that. But they certainly value and support their teachers well.
NORRIS: You know, you talked about what's going on in the classroom there and also at home where students are expected to work very hard on weekends and in the after hours. I'm wondering if part of this is something that can't be legislated. Does it have to do with cultural norms? The idea that mediocrity is not accepted, that students don't expect to have idle time for kickball and video games? That Saturdays are meant to be spent with a nose in the book.
Ms. STEWART: That clearly is a cultural issue. But cultural standards can be created. Many of the highest performing systems in the world today, many of which are in Asia - Korea, Japan, Singapore, et cetera - 25 years ago, they still had the same culture. They still valued education, but they didn't have the systems in place to deliver it.
So, I think that those kinds of norms can be created. They're an asset to build on. But they're also a norm that exists in many parts of the United States. But we have not really - not really pressed on it. Though, certainly, when I give talks, I talk to parents about turning off the television, turning off the video games. Say, if their students spent as much time studying as they did playing video games, we'd easily be at the level of the highest performing countries in the world.
NORRIS: Vivien Stewart, thank you very much for speaking with us.
Ms. STEWART: You're welcome.
NORRIS: Vivien Stewart is senior adviser for education at Asia Society.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
President Obama talked about a lot of things in his State of the Union speech, but the one thing everyone seems to remember is the salmon joke.
President BARACK OBAMA: Then there's my favorite example. The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in freshwater, but the Commerce Department handles them in when they're in saltwater. I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: As NPR's Elizabeth Shogren reports, the truth may get in the way of a good joke.
ELIZABETH SHOGREN: It's hard to find anyone more eager to reduce government bureaucracy than Damien Schiff. He fights regulations in court as a lawyer for the Pacific Legal Foundation.
Mr. DAMIEN SCHIFF (Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation): It's nice that the president has, at least in a laugh line, recognized the threats to our economy from overregulation, especially redundant environmental regulation. But it seems that the president may have been a little misinformed.
SHOGREN: Schiff says, in fact, the same agency has the prime responsibility to protect salmon both when they're in the ocean and when they swim up rivers to spawn. That's the National Marine Fisheries Service. It's part of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
No official from that agency was willing to correct the president on tape, nor was anyone from the Interior Department. But the departments put out a statement clarifying their roles.
The Interior Department restores inland habitat for salmon that spend most of their lives in the ocean. It also operates hatcheries in freshwater. The statement also stresses that the departments work together effectively and efficiently to protect salmon.
Jamie Rappaport headed the Fish and Wildlife Service under the Clinton administration. She also thinks the president singled out the wrong example.
Dr. JAMIE RAPPAPORT (Former Director, Fish and Wildlife Service): He was talking, of course, about trying to reduce government overlap and agency duplication. But salmon is a good example of agency coordination more than it is agency duplication.
SHOGREN: It is true that both Commerce and Interior share responsibility for protecting endangered species. But in most cases, one department is in charge of a particular species. There is at least one exception - sea turtles. Commerce protects them in the open sea and Interior oversees their nests on shore.
But picking on sea turtles after they suffered so much in the BP oil spill probably would not have gotten a laugh.
Elizabeth Shogren. NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
If you happen and enjoy one of the more than 20 million ant farms sold over the past 50-some-odd years, give thanks to Milton Levine. He was the novelty toy entrepreneur who dreamed up the hugely popular Ant Farm. Milton Levine died last week in California. He was 97. He liked to joke about just how powerful ants proved to be.
Mr. MILTON LEVINE (Co-Inventor, Ant Farm): That's something I'll never do. I'll never step on an ant. Put three of my kids through college.
BLOCK: Put three of his kids through college, one of them, Steven Levine, who ran the family business when his father retired. Steven, welcome to the program. I'm very sorry to hear about your loss.
Mr. STEVEN LEVINE (President, Uncle Milton Industries Inc.): Well, thank you. I appreciate it.
BLOCK: Tell me a bit more about your dad. I've read that he served in Army in World War II, came home and started a toy company. Why? What was his inspiration?
Mr. S. LEVINE: Well, at the time, hundreds of thousands of GIs were coming home, wondering what to do and what kind of work to get into. And he had read that there was a coming baby boom, obviously, so he figured that the toys and novelties would be a good field to get into.
BLOCK: And then by 1956, he gets the idea for an ant farm. How did he get the idea?
Mr. S. LEVINE: Ant Farm, which is a name they cooked up, it's actually a registered trademark, the generic name for that is a formicarium, which is a little thing to watch ants do their thing. And those, they had wood and glass ones for years and years that you would see in a classroom or a museum.
Their idea was to mass produce these things out of plastic and put a little farm scene in there and then mail the live ants to the customer. And that was really what their innovation was and it became an instant success, and sort of a fad during the late '50s, early '60s.
BLOCK: And why do you think it's been so successful all these years?
Mr. S. LEVINE: I think people just are fascinated by watching the ants. I mean, it's a really cool thing to watch. Ants instinctively build their nests, their tunnels underground. Grain by grain, they demonstrate industriousness, perseverance, teamwork and so forth. So it's a real learning experience but it's just a fascinating thing to watch.
BLOCK: What lessons did your father leave with you for either how to run a business or maybe just lessons to guide you through life?
Mr. S. LEVINE: I worked in the business for 32 years. I started in 1978 and he was my boss, too. And he was, you know, he was a pretty tough boss. But he taught me to work long hours until you get the job done. Work smart. Hire people who know how to do their jobs better than you do. And persevere and don't give up.
BLOCK: Kind of like an ant.
Mr. S. LEVINE: Exactly. He followed the ants. He sold ants, watched ants and that's the way he lived his life.
BLOCK: Well, Steven, thanks for remembering your dad with us today.
Mr. S. LEVINE: My pleasure.
BLOCK: That's Steven Levine remembering his father, Milton Levine, the creator of the Ant Farm. Milton Levine died last week in California at age 97.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Last week, for a brief moment, at the Australian Open tennis tournament, it appeared that the laws of physics had taken a leave of absence. While warming up for a match, tennis star Maria Sharapova noticed a spot on the hard court that felt a bit off. It seemed softer than the rest of the court.
The umpire came over to examine. He tried to bounce a ball on the spot but the ball refused to bounce. It simply dropped and stopped, as if stuck.
The court had developed what is known as a dead spot. And for more on this, I'm joined by Joe Ure of Sport Court. They provide playing surfaces for basketball and tennis courts. Welcome to the program.
Mr. JOE URE (Director of Distribution Sales, Sport Court): Thank you.
NORRIS: Now, anyone who plays tennis sometimes claims that there's a dead spot or a spot on the court where maybe the ball doesn't bounce the right way, but this was truly a dead spot. The ball just did not bounce.
Mr. URE: Yeah, I've never seen a ball not bounce at all. It was like Velcro. It was amazing.
NORRIS: What causes something like that?
Mr. URE: A dead spot in a tennis court like that would normally be caused by the surface that they're playing on not being bonded to the subsurface.
NORRIS: So help us understand that. There would be sort of some cement underlay, and then over the top of that would be the surface where tennis is actually played?
Mr. URE: Yes, typically the sub-base is going to be concrete or asphalt, and then a surface is laid over that. In the case of the Australian Open, it's probably a cushioned surface. So there's probably several layers that are put down.
And then the actual playing surface at the top is an acrylic paint with some fine grit in it to give it some traction, and it has the colors and the lines painted on it. If that top surface doesn't bond to that concrete or asphalt, you can have a dead spot underneath it.
NORRIS: How did they fix the problem in Australia?
Mr. URE: Well, from the video, it looked like they poked a hole in it and allowed probably the heated gases to escape and pushed it down. I would suspect that maybe they came in at night and shot some glue in there and got it to bond down tighter to the subsurface.
NORRIS: You know, I'm just wondering how often this happens and whether there are cases where sometimes people live with it. I mean, in the Garden, it's said that there were several dead spots on the parquet floor, and that might even give the Celtics a bit of a home-team advantage.
Mr. URE: Yeah, it's not really common, but it does happen, and the Celtics floor was an old floor and had developed some dead spots. And they do talk about it jokingly as the home-court advantage. If you know where those dead spots are, you would avoid them yourself and get your opponents to play into them to your advantage.
But we just replaced that floor for the Boston Gardens, and they're very happy with that new floor.
NORRIS: So, you know, when you were watching that video, what was going through your mind? You had to be thinking about the guy that actually was responsible for that court where this happened.
Mr. URE: What was going through my mind was I'm glad that it's someone else and not me.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: Well, Joe Ure, thanks so much for talking to us.
Mr. URE: You bet, thank you.
NORRIS: Joe Ure is the director of distribution sales for Connor Sport Court in Salt Lake City, Utah. We were talking about a dead spot found in the surface of one of the tennis courts at the Australian Open.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In Egypt, two people were reportedly killed today during demonstrations: a protester and a police officer. It was the second day of protests against President Hosni Mubarak in defiance of a government ban. Neither side appears to be heeding U.S. appeals for calm - and we'll hear more about that American response in a few minutes.
NORRIS: Police charged crowds with batons and fired teargas and rubber bullets to disperse them. Protesters responded by hurling stones and burning tires.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson witnessed one of the impromptu demonstrations in Cairo.
Unidentified Group: (Speaking foreign language)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Protesters chant from the rooftop of Cairo's Bar Association, shaking their fists at heavily armed police officers circling below. The protesters also call out to passersby across the street. They urge them to join in the quest for political freedom and an end to Mubarak's 30-year rule.
(Soundbite of whistling)
NELSON: Protesters cheer when dozens of people cross the street to join them. The newcomers surge past the security cordon and flood the sidewalk in front of the building.
Unidentified Group: (Speaking foreign language)
NELSON: That's when the police make their move. First, a plainclothes agent tries forcing the NPR team to leave.
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken).
NELSON: What are you hiding?
Unidentified Man #1: (foreign language spoken)
NELSON: He says it's (foreign language spoken) or forbidden to be here.
Why is it (foreign language spoken)? I have (unintelligible).
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: Saying a journalist should report on what is happening has no effect, says translator Nagua Hasan(ph).
Ms. NAGUA HASAN (Translator): He's saying, please leave or else I have to take another precaution. I can take away her recorder.
(Soundbite of siren)
NELSON: Soon, it's clear what the police don't want anyone to see: officers in an armored truck drive at the protesters on the sidewalk.
(Soundbite of gunfire)
Unidentified Man #2: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: From the other direction, officers fire teargas into the crowd. The attack sends everyone on the street fleeing. Hot on their heels are dozens of riot policemen who wildly swing their batons.
Unidentified Man #3: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: The fate of the people on top of the roof is unclear, so is the fate of hundreds of other protesters detained since Tuesday.
(Soundbite of crowd)
NELSON: At a nearby office, dozens of volunteer lawyers work around the clock to find out where the detainees are being held.
(Soundbite of crowd)
NELSON: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Cairo.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The demonstrations spreading across Egypt also pose a challenge for the United States. Egypt is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. This morning, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called for restraint in Egypt.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): We support the universal rights of the Egyptian people, including the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly, and we urge the Egyptian authorities not to prevent peaceful protest.
BLOCK: To better understand the U.S. response to the crisis, I spoke with Tamara Wittes, who's the deputy assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs. She says the calls for change in Egypt are not new.
Ms. TAMARA WITTES (Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Department of State): I think that there's been a lot of debate and discussion in Egypt over the last several years in fact, over political reforms, over economic concerns, over concerns about relationships within society, for example, between Copts and Muslims. These are no secret to anybody what's on the agenda.
BLOCK: One aspiration, of course, that we're hearing from the people in the streets of Egypt is for Hosni Mubarak to step down immediately or be removed from power. How does the U.S. respond to the protesters who want him out?
Ms. WITTES: I think it's important that the government see this as an opportunity to respond to the concerns that people are raising. It's not about an individual. It's about a process, and it's about rights.
BLOCK: It does seem, though, that for many of the protesters that would be unsatisfying for them. That reform is not what they're looking for. They're looking for a new government. They're looking for a revolution.
Ms. WITTES: What I have heard in my many visits to Egypt is that people are looking for an opportunity to have a voice in shaping the decisions that affect their lives, and this is a chance for the government to demonstrate that it can respond to those issues.
BLOCK: What specifically would you be looking for the Egyptian government to do? What actions?
Ms. WITTES: There are a number of things that we have discussed, both publicly and in our diplomatic engagements with the Egyptian government over quite a long time beginning with the emergency law, removing that, and if they're going to replace it with a counter-terrorism law that that should be one that respects civil liberties.
There are a number of other specific issues that we've raised publicly over the last year related to their electoral process. I think these are things that we've been talking about for some time, and there are issues more importantly that Egyptians themselves have been talking about for a long time.
BLOCK: Egypt, of course, is a key U.S. ally in the Middle East. How does the administration walks the line between fostering that alliance and, at the same time, pressing for change from an autocratic government that suppresses dissent?
Ms. WITTES: Let me say a couple of things. First, I think we have a very longstanding and multifaceted relationship with Egypt, with the government, but also with the people. It's a relationship that stretches back decades. And the second thing is that that's a relationship that rests in shared goals for the region, including, you know, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including stability and reintegration of Iraq into the region.
And we believe that Egypt is a valuable partner, and that it will be into the future a valued partner on those issues. And we also believe that Egypt can be a stronger leader in the region to the extent that it engages in domestic reforms that respond to its people's needs.
BLOCK: It seems that a lot of the protesters in Egypt are looking to the model of what happened in Tunisia, with the popular uprising against Ben Ali. Do you anticipate a wave now of such protests heading across North Africa or through the Middle East, and are there particular countries that you're keeping an especially close eye on right now?
Ms. WITTES: You know, I think that what happened in Tunisia is something that Tunisians did for themselves, and therefore, it's specific. But I think that the challenges that countries across the region are facing are common challenges.
The fact that you have this rising young generation that has rising expectations. They're wired. They're connected to the world. They want to play a role. It's not just about jobs, and it's not just about education. It's about something much broader than that.
I think those are challenges that we see all across the region, and I think we see governments as well as the private sector and civil society responding in different ways to those challenges. And the conversation in the region about how to respond has been going on for a long time.
BLOCK: There have been arrests of protesters in Egypt, killing of some protesters. What is the message from the U.S. government to the Egyptian police and military on how they respond to these protests?
Ms. WITTES: We are strong supporters in Egypt and around the world of people's universal rights to free assembly and free speech. We would like to see the Egyptian government deal with these protesters peacefully.
BLOCK: Which means allowing them to continue to spread?
Ms. WITTES: Which means allowing them to assemble peaceably, to express themselves and to ask their government for a redress of grievances. Those are universal human rights, and we support them everywhere.
BLOCK: Tamara Wittes, thanks very much.
Ms. WITTES: Thank you.
BLOCK: Tamara Wittes is deputy assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern affairs.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The new Republican chief of the House Oversight Committee has vowed to take on half a dozen investigations in his first three months as head of the panel. California Republican Darrell Issa says everything from the WikiLeaks release of diplomatic cables to food recalls by the FDA will be under scrutiny.
Today, the largest target came first: the Obama administration's handling of the financial meltdown. NPR's Audie Cornish reports from Capitol Hill.
AUDIE CORNISH: New Chairman Darrell Issa was looking to shake things up, and he did it by toning things down. He told lawmakers they were not to make opening statements.
Representative DARRELL ISSA (Republican, California): For the purpose of all of us, including the freshmen, I want to just start off by listening first. I recognize that tradition is that we hold the members, or the witnesses here, for sometimes an hour through opening statements. That is a tradition that I intend to break.
CORNISH: But Democrats have spent the last few days sparring with Issa about proposed rules on his subpoena power and other procedures. Democrats like Ohio's Dennis Kucinich weren't going to make this easy.
Representative DENNIS KUCINICH (Democrat, Ohio): I've been in the Congress for 14 years, and I've never - it's just unprecedented that a ranking member not be permitted to give an opening statement or for a chair to dispense with opening statements. So the people - so the people know...
Rep. ISSA: Does the gentleman have a parliamentary inquiry?
Rep. KUCINICH: I asked - I didn't make a parliamentary inquiry. I asked...
Rep. ISSA: Then the gentleman is no longer recognized.
CORNISH: Today's inquiry focused on the $700 billion bank bailout fund, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. It passed at the end of the Bush administration, but the panel's inquiry focused on how current Treasury officials have handled it.
The first witness, acting assistant treasury secretary Timothy Massad, was quick to praise the program. He said it's on track to recover billions of dollars and in the end may cost taxpayers $25 to $50 billion instead of $700 billion.
Mr. TIMOTHY MASSAD (Acting Assistant Treasury Secretary): I recognize that TARP has not been popular. There is good reason for that. No one likes using taxpayer dollars to rescue financial institutions. Nonetheless, sitting here today, more than two years after a bipartisan Congress passed the legislation that created TARP, it is clear that the program has been remarkably effective by any objective measure.
CORNISH: But the special inspector general for TARP, Neil Barofsky, said the program and the new financial regulations that followed have made markets comfortable with the idea that firms can be considered too big to fail and could be bailed out again.
And Barofsky called another financial rescue fund to help homeowners avoid foreclosure a failure.
Mr. NEIL BAROFSKY (Special Inspector General, Troubled Asset Relief Program): Hope is slipping away, and Treasury's administration of this program gives little cause for optimism. They continue to refuse to adopt even the most basic metrics and goals and benchmarks to measure success.
CORNISH: Some Democrats asked what more could be done to help the program. But Republicans like Connie Mack of Florida had another idea.
Representative CONNIE MACK (Republican, Florida): What I want to hear is not what's the next regulation, what's the next program, what's the next acronym that we're going to start talking about that is a failure because government can't do it. I want to hear from both of you, if you would, very specifically: What should we repeal?
CORNISH: Neither witness had an answer, although Massad argued that the home loan program was good for the half-a-million people it has helped. In the meantime, Congressman Issa promised that this was just the first of many investigations on the issue.
Audie Cornish, NPR News, the Capitol.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
President Obama traveled to Wisconsin today.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And he went to...
Mr. JACK CASHMAN(ph): Manitowoc.
BLOCK: Manitowoc. That was Jack Cashman this morning in that very city, about 80 miles north of Milwaukee.
NORRIS: We take you there because of letters such as this one that we received yesterday from Sue Vliet(ph) of Milwaukee.
BLOCK: Being a lifelong Wisconsinite, I am accustomed to living with many unusually-named towns and cities that often utilize the original name given to a location by the Native Americans who first lived here. However, please do your homework by preparing for a story, particularly something as auspicious as a presidential visit.
NORRIS: Sue Vliet and a few more of you shook your fingers at us because yesterday, we mispronounced the name of that Wisconsin city. So our correspondent Don Gonyea paid a morning visit to a diner there, Warren's Restaurant, for some help.
Ms. LEANNA LEONOWICZ(ph): The city is Manitowoc.
Mr. MIKE PEARCE(ph): Manitowoc.
Ms. LEONOWICZ: M-A-N-I-T-O-W-O-C.
Mr. PEARCE: Manitowoc, Man-it-o-wok.
BLOCK: That's Mike Pearce and Leanna Leonowicz in Manitowoc.
NORRIS: Manitowoc, got it.
BLOCK: Moving on, some of you were annoyed by our interview yesterday with two small business owners.
NORRIS: I asked them what letter grade they would give President Obama from the perspective of a businessperson. Lowell Miles, the CEO of Miles Fiberglass and Composites, responded this way:
Mr. LOWELL MILES (Chief Executive Officer, Miles Fiberglass and Composites): I would give him a F.
NORRIS: An F?
Mr. MILES: Yes.
BLOCK: From the other small business owner, better, but not by much: a D.
Well, William C. Johnson of Lake Forest Park, Washington, found that frustrating. He writes: It became apparent to me that both of these small business owners were quite likely Republican. I would have found the story far more interesting and informative if you had managed to juxtapose a Republican business owner with a Democratic business owner.
NORRIS: Ann Tiplady(ph) of Wallingford, Vermont, sent in this defense of the president. She writes: I am a struggling small business owner, and I agree that things are very hard right now. But please, we could have lost everything. And he is one of many captains driving this ship.
BLOCK: Now we have a happy ending to a story we brought you yesterday. The Cooper's hawk that was stuck in the dome of the main reading room at the Library of Congress has been rescued.
Yesterday we heard yesterday about the hawk, a young female, from the Library's Tori Hill.
Ms. TORI HILL (Library of Congress): She is just sitting on a perch, looking down at us. And then every so often, she takes a circle swoop around the mural of the figure of human understanding.
NORRIS: Well, with the help of two starlings in a trap as bait, the hawk was rescued this morning. Kennon Smith is a volunteer raptor bander, and he was one of three people with extensive knowledge of hawks who climbed high up into the dome of the reading room and laid the trap.
Mr. KENNON SMITH (Raptor Bander): The starlings were motionless. They were like statues because they knew the hawk was there. So we waited and waited and, you know, finally one of the starlings - you can actually hear some street noise all the way up there. And there was some noise, and one of the starlings moved his beak and lifted his neck a little bit, and I says: Oh, good, he finally moved. I said that's all it's going to take.
BLOCK: Sure enough, the hawk swooped down and landed on the trap, at which point she was caught. No starlings were harmed in the rescue. The Cooper's hawk is in OK shape but hungry. She'll spend a few days in rehab getting fed, and then she'll be released.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In his State of the Union address, President Obama called on colleges and universities to reinstate the Reserve Officer Training Corps on their campuses. Some elite schools haven't had ROTC chapters since the late 1960s, but the end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell could open the door.
As Diane Orson, of member station WNPR reports, many students at Yale think bringing back ROTC is a good idea.
DIANE ORSON: Yale student Katherine Miller says President Obama's message is clear: The military is becoming more inclusive, and that means she'll be able to pursue her dream of a career in uniform. Miller left West Point last year and transferred to Yale because of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the policy that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly.
Ms. KATHERINE MILLER: When I entered Yale, I had an environment where I knew that I could be myself in. You know, I didn't have to hide my sexuality. I didn't have to, you know, pretend to be someone that I was not.
ORSON: Miller is among only a handful of students at Yale actively pursuing a military career. The school hasn't had an ROTC unit on campus since the early 1970s. Cadets travel to satellite programs at other schools for their training. The military left Yale and many Ivy League institutions at the height of the anti-Vietnam War protests. Later, Yale struggled with the Department of Defense over its policy on gays and lesbians.
But now, with the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, many elite schools are in serious talks with military officials about bringing ROTC back.
Yale College Dean Mary Miller.
Professor MARY MILLER (Dean, Yale College): What we also have been doing is looking very closely at how other institutions that we think of as similar to Yale, how has ROTC unfolded in recent years on their campus.
ORSON: But ROTC's return is not a sure bet. For one thing, the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell has not as yet been implemented. And the military may not be that enthusiastic about opening additional detachments. There's the question of cost.
And Colonel Ray Pettit of U.S. Army Cadet Command in Virginia says the military has to consider student interest.
Colonel RAY PETTIT (U.S. Army Cadet Command, Virginia): One of the downsides with respect to getting the leadership from Ivy League schools is that generally, those students will perform their required service to the Army and tend to get out of the Army at a higher rate than non-Ivy League students do.
ORSON: Yale's governing council recently surveyed interest in ROTC in the wake of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal.
Twenty-year-old junior Jeff Gordon.
Mr. JEFF GORDON: Almost 70 percent of students would support the return of the program, given the repeal.
ORSON: Law school Student Yaman Salahi is not among them. He says ROTC culture does not belong in a university environment.
Mr. YAMAN SALAHI: The military is not a neutral force. And ROTC is not a neutral force. It ignores the fact that there's a tremendous amount of violence being committed by the military in the name of the American people.
ORSON: But former West Point cadet Katherine Miller says that tension may ease as the military starts to better reflect the nation it serves.
Ms. MILLER: Military service is something that a lot of people are interested in, initially. You know, and because Yale doesn't offer that, I don't think people get to see that.
ORSON: And having bridged both the military and elite college cultures, she says each side has a lot to gain from working with the other.
For NPR News, I'm Diane Orson in New Haven.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
We're going to focus now on another section from the president's State of the Union address. In a speech structured largely as a blueprint for the future, at one point, Mr. Obama did attempt to draw inspiration from a decisive moment in America's past.
President BARACK OBAMA: Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we would beat them to the moon. The science wasn't even there yet. NASA didn't exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.
This is our generation's Sputnik moment.
NORRIS: That first Sputnik moment came on October 4, 1957. Here's word of the satellite's launch, courtesy of Radio Moscow.
(Soundbite of Radio Moscow clip)
Unidentified Man: The first artificial Earth satellite in the world has now been created. This first satellite was, today, successfully launched in the USSR.
NORRIS: As President Obama said, news of Sputnik did two things: It caught America off guard, and it inspired the country to innovate on a grand scale.
And for more on that, we're joined by Paul Ceruzzi. He's chairman of the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum.
So glad you could come to the studio.
Dr. PAUL CERUZZI (Chairman, Space History Division, National Air and Space Museum): My pleasure to be here.
NORRIS: Now, take us back to the day before most Americans had ever even heard of Sputnik. What did the U.S. look like? Were we somewhat static at that point?
Dr. CERUZZI: Well, the United States had a healthy economy. The U.S. auto industry was doing very well. There was a lot of consumer economy. The teenager, what we now call the teenager, really came into existence as a market force. "American Bandstand" with Dick Clark had started up.
So it was a very healthy economy in some ways. But there was complacency. People didn't think that anybody could ever possibly catch us. And, of course, that was not true.
NORRIS: You know, President Obama said last night that because of Sputnik, America unleashed this massive wave of innovation. Those young people that you talked about, that "Bandstand" generation, were they inspired to think about their future in a different way? To think that, you know, if we're going to beat the Soviets, we have to a part of this. We have to be bigger, better, smarter.
Dr. CERUZZI: Yes. It was - you look at some of the television programs, there was a lot of emphasis on science and technology, on aerospace. And I think a lot of young people picked up on that. It was really drilled home the importance of studying mathematics and physics. There was something called the New Math, of which I'm a product, where they attempted to restructure the teaching of math along more fundamental principles. Some math teachers thought it was a kind of joke, but it didn't kill anybody, let's put it that way. I survived it.
NORRIS: How did industry respond to the Sputnik moment?
Dr. CERUZZI: The aerospace industry was already very much going full steam with defense-oriented missiles and rockets and jet aviation. So they just ramped it up even more. Commercial aviation was doing well.
1957 is a very interesting year. It was the first year that passenger traffic in the United States surpassed rail traffic for long distance passengers. And air traffic across the Atlantic surpassed steamships for passengers.
So the aerospace industry was doing well, and this just increased the amount of money that that was available to further their work.
NORRIS: What role did the government play?
Dr. CERUZZI: Well, I think the government had two very direct influences, which are right out of a consequence of Sputnik. And one was the creation of NASA. The other agency that was created was called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or ARPA. And its charter, if I could simplify it a little bit, was to say, let's not ever be surprised by Sputnik again.
They came up with an idea about networking computers, which became something called the ARPANET. And many people say that's the technical ancestor of today's Internet.
NORRIS: Hmm. Paul Ceruzzi, thanks for coming in.
Dr. CERUZZI: Thank you very much.
NORRIS: Paul Ceruzzi is the chairman of the Space History Division at the National Air and Space Museum.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Along with a wave of innovation, Sputnik also spawned a boom in memorabilia, from glassware to globes, clothing to furniture.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
There's the Sputnik blueprint tile coaster online for a mere $10, also available as a framed tile for $5 more.
BLOCK: The Sputnik 20th anniversary 15 ounce mug, a bargain at $15, also available in large for 18.
NORRIS: There's also a Sputnik anniversary cap and T-shirt available in both light and dark.
BLOCK: A handsome Sputnik light fixture in a modern 1950s style made of polished brass.
NORRIS: And no collection would be complete without a lovely 4-by-5 photo reprint of the Sputnik 2 dog, Laika, from 1958.
NORRIS: We may not have beaten the Russians into space, but when it comes to the tchotchkes race, we're going strong.
(Soundbite of song, "Sputnik, Satellite Girl")
JERRY ENGLER AND THE FOUR EKKOS (Band): (Singing) Well, I say the fun has just begun. We're on Sputnik number one. A'flying through outer space at a rockin' rollin' pace. Hey, we're going to get our kicks on a little old thing called a Sputnik. I said spoo-spoo-spoot-a-nick-a-chick. I said spoo-spoo-spoot-a-nick-a-chick. I said spoo-spoo-spoot-a-nick-a-chick. I said spoo-spoo-spoot-a-nick-a-chick. Flying all around the world with my crazy satellite girl.
BLOCK: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
It's been a tough week for one of Chicago's most prominent public figures - and we're not talking about Rahm Emanuel - Chicago Bears quarterback Jay Cutler injured his knee during Sunday's NFC Championship game. He didn't play in the second half and the Bears lost to the Green Bay Packers.
Cutler then got blasted by his peers in a storm of Twitter messages that essentially said he quit on his team.
As NPR's Tom Goldman reports, that has set off a rollicking debate about the messages and how they were delivered.
TOM GOLDMAN: Athletes and Twitter: for the most part, says Jeff Pearlman, the marriage has been a success.
Mr. JEFF PEARLMAN (Author and Columnist, SportsIllustrated.com): I almost think more than, like, really good tickets, what fans want is really good access.
GOLDMAN: Pearlman is an author and columnist for SportsIllustrated.com.
Mr. PEARLMAN: Nobody cares if I'm eating Cheerios for breakfast. But for some reason, people really find it interesting that Shaq is eating Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast or LeBron is thinking this or he's going to that club, and it gives fans a very, very good taste of what an athlete's life is and what they're going through.
GOLDMAN: In return, it gives athletes a marketing tool. For the estimated 500 NFL players with Twitter accounts, it's a chance to reveal a personality often obscured by pads and helmets. But NFL agent Donald Yee doesn't endorse it with his guys.
Mr. DONALD YEE (Sports Agent): It's not really an issue for us because we counsel them on these kinds of things and try to get them to understand the import of their words.
GOLDMAN: Sunday, a bunch of NFL players, current and former, discovered just how their words, even in 140 characters or less, can wreak havoc.
Arizona defensive back Kerry Rhodes watched the Chicago-Green Bay game, as we did, with the same selective camera shots. He saw images of Jay Cutler with a hangdog look, out of the game and seemingly removed from his teammates, all while a third-string quarterback tried to rescue the Bears.
Rhodes tweeted: Come one, Cutler. You have to come back. This is the NFC Championship if you didn't know.
From the Seattle Seahawks' Raheem Brock: Cutler, you little sissy.
And from former star Deion Sanders: All the medicine in pro locker rooms, this dude comes out. Folks, I never question a player's injury, but I do question a player's heart.
The comments were startling for several reasons. NFL players know how hard the game is. Cutler is not the most popular guy, but his toughness is pretty widely accepted and, says Donald Yee, only Jay Cutler knew how his knee felt.
Mr. YEE: Historically, players wouldn't typically speculate, at least publicly, on how another player was really feeling.
GOLDMAN: Historically, athletes haven't said much of anything publicly -a reality immortalized in the 1998 baseball film "Bull Durham," where veteran Crash Davis tutors rookie Nuke LaLoosh on the art of sports cliche.
(Soundbite of movie, "Bull Durham")
Mr. KEVIN COSTNER (Actor): (as Crash Davis) We got to play them one day at a time.
Mr. TIM ROBBINS (Actor): (as Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh) Got to play -it's pretty boring, you know?
Mr. COSTNER: (as Crash Davis) Of course, it's boring. That's the point. Write it down.
GOLDMAN: But Sunday proved how, in the raw, unedited world of Twitter, athletes can be anything but boring, even if it means violating the code of never publicly criticizing a fellow athlete.
Is raw better than boring? Fans and reporters might say so, but even some of the players who tweeted Sunday apologized afterwards. True remorse or more marketing? We don't know.
But sportswriter Jeff Pearlman, who at 38 says he straddles the social media generation gap, says he knows how the NFLers could have avoided trouble in the first place.
Mr. PEARLMAN: I feel like the one thing that's missing in communication these days is the process of putting a letter in an envelope and putting a stamp on it, which gives you a little time to think about what you're saying before you say it.
GOLDMAN: But not much solace for Jay Cutler, who was asked about the tweets after Sunday's game. Sitting in front of his locker, Cutler replied, no comment on that. Then, according to one reporter's account, Cutler bit his lip as tears welled.
Tom Goldman, NPR News.
: community colleges. He says they can best adapt to the nation's economic realities and deliver the education and training Americans so desperately need. But this year, states are cutting their budgets to the bone.
And as NPR's Claudio Sanchez reports, the president hasn't delivered the federal aid to community colleges that he promised.
CLAUDIO SANCHEZ: To hear community college officials describe the impact of state funding cuts, it's never been this bad.
NOAH BROWN: Well, I don't know if the sky is falling, but the challenge that we face right now is quite severe.
SANCHEZ: Noah Brown is president of the American Association of Community College Trustees. According to his organization, 43 states have slashed funding for higher education and financial aid for needy students.
Ivy Tech Community College and its 23 campuses in Indiana, for example, took a $10 million hit last year. Funding from the state dropped from $3,000 per student to 2,300.
Ivy Tech president Tom Snyder says a majority of those students, 70 percent, are unemployed adults.
TOM SNYDER: We actually are educating the people that will help rebuild the economy.
SANCHEZ: To save money, Snyder says his institution now relies almost entirely on part-time, adjunct faculty and is offering more and more of its courses online. It's a bare-bones budget, although it's not nearly as bad as other places.
Across the country, many community colleges have capped enrollment, eliminated programs and courses, laid off faculty and raised tuition anywhere from 5 to 32 percent.
Noah Brown says community colleges are struggling at the worst possible time. Enrollment has skyrocketed because there are so many displaced workers seeking education and training.
BROWN: For example, I visited a college recently where they have increased the number of very early morning programs, as early as 5 a.m., and they're finding those courses full. I know of another institution that's running courses virtually 24/7, in the middle of the night, and they're finding a good number of students in those classes.
SANCHEZ: Layoffs, tuition increases, shoestring budgets - it's not what community college leaders envisioned. Back in 2009, President Obama praised community colleges for what he called their crucial role in the nation's economic recovery.
BARACK OBAMA: We know that in the coming years, jobs requiring at least an associate degree are projected to grow twice as fast as jobs requiring no college experience. We will not fill those jobs or even keep those jobs here in America without the training offered by community colleges.
SANCHEZ: Mr. Obama was in Warren, Michigan, a town reeling from auto industry layoffs. There, he promised $12 billion to help stabilize funding for community colleges. They never saw any of that money. Why?
The president couldn't sell it to Congress, so lawmakers blocked most of it. The administration finally settled for a smaller amount - $2 billion - for a competitive grants program that Labor Secretary Hilda Solis unveiled just last week.
If community college leaders feel betrayed or upset that they didn't get more, Solis says, she's not hearing about it.
HILDA SOLIS: What I will tell you is that the federal government is not right now in the position where we can address all the shortages that are happening with respect to higher education.
SANCHEZ: In other words, the federal government can only offer a Band- Aid, leaving community colleges to fend for themselves with state funding cuts as far as the eye can see.
Like most community college presidents though, Tom Snyder of Ivy Tech is careful not to sound too critical of the Obama administration. After all, he says, $2 billion is better than nothing.
SNYDER: While it's disappointing we didn't get a larger amount, I think it is a sea change that community colleges now are on the national agenda, that you do speak of them in the same breath as you talk about the recovering workforce.
SANCHEZ: With deeper budget cuts looming in 2011, though, Snyder and most college officials say all the praise and attention in the world won't mean very much if community colleges have to shut their doors to the people who've come to depend on them.
Claudio Sanchez, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Berkeley, California is famous for taking on liberal causes, which is why officials there may not have expected a controversy over a proposal to help city workers pay for sex change operations. The amount of cash at stake is relatively small.
But as NPR's Richard Gonzales reports, it still stirred up a debate over how much compassion the city can afford in these tough economic times.
RICHARD GONZALES, Host:
Lynn Riordan sits in a Berkeley coffee shop known for hosting neighborhood meetings. She's a fixture here. She works in the city's finance department and she's active in her union.
BLOCK: I suppose the unusual thing about me is I'm a transsexual woman. They estimate 1 in 50,000 people are born this way.
GONZALES: That is, in Riordan's case, she was born as a boy, but she says she knew something wasn't right.
BLOCK: When I was five, I realized I was a girl. I never thought I was a boy. I quickly learned, however, though, that people wanted me to pretend to be a boy.
GONZALES: Riordan finally had a sex change operation eight years ago when she was 49 years old. She paid for the procedure herself, which at the time cost $11,000. Now she's advocating on behalf of transsexuals who can't afford the surgery and who are Berkeley city employees.
BLOCK: We're campaigning to remove the discriminatory restrictions against treating transsexuality and its related medical problems. Right now, there's discrimination, and you know, tough luck. If you have this condition, you don't get treated. If you got every other condition, they'll treat you.
GONZALES: Gender reassignment surgery currently isn't covered by Berkeley's two health insurance providers. So the City Council is considering setting aside a total of $20,000 a year to offset the cost.
City Councilman Darryl Moore spearheads the proposal, following the example of San Francisco, which has offered that benefit for a decade.
BLOCK: It's not something that's cosmetic or something that's recreational. And it's not something you do in a day. You can't just walk into a doctor's office and say you want sexual reassignment surgery. It's a very long process and it's a very last step in that process.
GONZALES: The $20,000 would be available to any city employee on a first come, first served basis. To qualify, the employee has to have lived as an opposite-sex person for at least a year and already undergone hormone therapy. Around town, even in this liberal bastion, the proposal raises eyebrows and questions.
BLOCK: I was shocked when I saw this on the agenda for the city council and I thought, what in the world is going on here?
GONZALES: Ann Slaby is a former Berkeley zoning commissioner.
BLOCK: I have a great deal of empathy for people who feel that they're caught in a body that they don't wish to have. But the question becomes, who's going to pay for it? How come I'm paying?
GONZALES: And at a local grocery store, the proposal is a ready topic.
Taj Johns is a retired city employee.
BLOCK: What they need to do, if they're doing something like that, is to set up a fund for anybody that may need assistance with some type of medical treatment. For example, if people need help with dentistry, people need help with eyeglasses, anybody could apply for money from that fund. So it just shouldn't be for any targeted group. It should be available for anybody.
GONZALES: Michael Wilson, a nurse, says he supports the idea as a good use of public funds.
BLOCK: Especially because it's not something that's going down the drain and never coming back. When you look at what - the life of a transgender person, being able to be move into the body type that works for them is actually going to be more productive for society as we move forward.
GONZALES: $20,000 is admittedly small change in the scope of the city budget. But many question whether it should be offered when Berkeley faces more than $250 million in unfunded pension liabilities.
BLOCK: Not to me, but I'm not in that situation.
GONZALES: George Woodward is a housing contractor.
BLOCK: Berkeley has a history of fighting for issues that are outside the normal range, the regular range. And that's what the town is known for. It wouldn't surprise me.
GONZALES: Whether the Berkeley City Council will continue that tradition and vote to pay for its employees' sex change operations will be weighed in a vote in mid-February.
Richard Gonzales, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
One of the nation's premier Historically Black Universities is revamping its academic offerings. Howard University plans to reduce the number of majors and graduate programs. Among those on the chopping block: classics and African studies.
An official decision is expected any day now, and some students and faculty aren't happy.
NPR's Alex Kellogg reports.
ALEX KELLOGG: Howard University has offered German classes since 1875.
Unidentified Woman #1: (Foreign language spoken)
KELLOGG: The university has had a German major since the 1940s. That's longer than some majority white schools. But that may soon change, and for good reason, university leaders say. After all, Howard has just one German major left.
EBONY DENISE MINGO: My name is Ebony Denise Mingo. I am a sophomore, and I'm from Lexington, South Carolina. And I'm 19 years old.
KELLOGG: Mingo spoke as she was rushing across Howard's campus, here in the nation's capital, to her next class.
DENISE MINGO: I think it's a bad idea for them to cut the language, but they need to do more within Howard to spike the interests of the students to want to study German.
KELLOGG: She says she fell in love with Germany when she traveled there as a kid. She's now in German 4.
NORRIS: the classics and philosophy.
Students will still be able to take courses such as African-American Philosophy and Slavery in the Ancient World, but that doesn't satisfy the university's critics. They say a premier black college like Howard plays a special role. For example, Howard has one of the only freestanding philosophy departments at a Historically Black College. So critics argue a cut there would be a big loss.
University president Sidney Ribeau disagrees.
SIDNEY RIBEAU: Part of this is also carving out territory for Howard University, where we are the best of kind in certain areas - just like if you go to University of Michigan or you go to Harvard or if you go to Columbia or if you go to Stanford.
KELLOGG: Howard's famous alums include Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, actor Ossie Davis and black radical Stokely Carmichael.
The university was founded just after the end of the Civil War. It started as a seminary for African-American clergymen. Today, it has 171 academic majors. That's a huge number for a university with only around 10,500 students.
The plan is to cut 20 undergraduate degree programs and at least as many graduate programs.
RIBEAU: And it will also allow us to enhance the overall quality of our academic programs so that we're sure that we're nationally competitive.
KELLOGG: Howard's board of trustees is expected to make a final decision on the president's recommendations this weekend.
The big lightning rod - cutting the African studies major. Critics say that would send the wrong message. In fact, the classes remain popular, even if the major isn't. There's just a half dozen students pursuing African studies right now.
Professor Mbye Cham is the chair of the department. He points out that Howard pioneered the idea that such disciplines are vital.
MBYE CHAM: I don't think Howard can afford to retreat totally from that legacy. I guess the question is how do you move forward?
KELLOGG: President Ribeau says Howard's future is in the areas of growing interest. The university plans to offer more classes in popular languages - Swahili and Chinese, for example.
Unidentified Woman #2: (Foreign language spoken)
OLIVIA FORD: My name is Olivia Ford. I am 18 years old. I am from Chicago, Illinois, and I am a freshman at Howard University.
KELLOGG: Ford was surprised when she arrived last fall to find Howard didn't have a Chinese major. She's happy they'll likely have one before she graduates.
FORD: And I think it's really good that they're making changes, kind of, to adapt to future student interests.
KELLOGG: Howard graduates more black doctors, engineers and Ph.D.s than virtually any other institution of higher learning in the country, even though just 10 percent of black students currently attend a Historically Black College.
But like many universities, Howard's endowment has shrunk in recent years. While President Ribeau insists these changes aren't driven by finances, he says that to remain competitive, Howard must shift resources to where they are needed most.
Alex Kellogg, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
The entire music industry has fractured in recent years. It's still dominated by a few big corporations, but they are in trouble. And there are thousands of smaller companies in the game too.
NPR's Laura Sydell reports on the growth of websites and services that try to sell musicians a way to connect with their fans.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE")
LAURA SYDELL: This song has been listened to nearly 250,000 times on the MySpace page belonging to Amy Kuney.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ALL DOWNHILL FROM HERE")
AMY KUNEY: (Singing) Can't pull myself out of the bed. It's 12:00.
SYDELL: Kuney is 25 and is part of the new class of musicians who are bushwhacking their way to success. Kuney isn't necessarily trying to use the old formula of getting signed to a record label, which is becoming increasingly difficult as the business splinters. Instead, she's using a variety of online tools from social media to YouTube.
Reese Lasher is her manager.
REESE LASHER: If you do things according to the formula, you have so much competition. And if you do things in a very different way and you forge your own path, you really don't have any at all. And so we spend a lot of time trying to figure out ways to connect Amy with her fans in an out-of-the-box way.
SYDELL: Whatever Lasher is doing for Kuney, it's working, because as an unsigned artist, Amy Kuney is making enough money to support herself, her manager and a small staff.
Eric Garland, the founder and CEO of Big Champagne, which tracks music online, says Kuney represents the new do-it-yourself dream for tens of thousands of musicians.
ERIC GARLAND: You do have many artists who set out to make a living as a small business - as an independent artist - and grow that business without necessarily having any intention or expectation that they will do business with a major music company.
SYDELL: But these independent artists do expect to do business with a growing array of small companies. Amy Kuney's manager, Reese Lasher, says she's constantly sifting through new sites that promise to help musicians manage their fans, their download sales, their social networks.
LASHER: And to figure out which one is the best is really difficult, because there are all sorts of, like, hidden fees - you know, with Bandcamp, you have - they take 15 percent, which sounds great - it's significantly less than iTunes, obviously - but then there's also, like, the 3 percent that you have to pay for PayPal.
SYDELL: Another service musicians are using is TuneCore. Jeff Price is the company's founder and CEO.
JEFF PRICE: And the concept behind TuneCore is to enable any artist or any musician or anyone that creates music or sound or spoken word to have access to distribution.
SYDELL: That means that TuneCore will get your music on iTunes, Napster, Amazon, Zune and a long list of other places where artists want to be selling their songs. Unlike the old record label model, where the artist only got a percentage of the sales, TuneCore artists pay an up-front fee - $10 for a single, 50 bucks for an album - and they get to keep all the proceeds from their sales. Price, who worked for years in the traditional music business, says that in 2009 TuneCore artists generated over $35 million in gross revenue.
PRICE: Every single month, I'm looking at thousands upon thousands of artists generating - some, just a hundred dollars, but many generating over 10, 20, $30,000. And that's not an anomaly anymore.
SYDELL: But TuneCore also has over 500,000 artists using its services. Most of them are not making a living, says analyst Eric Garland.
GARLAND: Every sound being created in every dorm room or every shower or every basement is now just a couple of clicks away from being out there.
SYDELL: The challenge now is to rise above the noise, and many new online companies are trying to sell musicians on the idea that they can help them do that.
AMIR MOHAMMED: There are so many companies that are coming about that are realizing that there are enough artists to make a living off of.
SYDELL: Amir Mohammed is a rap artist and producer who goes by the name of Oddisee. He says he's constantly getting what he calls reeled in to trying new services.
MOHAMMED: And the reel in is when the service is free at first and you become addicted to it and hooked, and it becomes essential in your business. And then, they initiate a fee.
SYDELL: Oddisee is one the lucky independents who's making a living. He's part of a hip-hop scene with its roots in the area around Washington, D.C.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I'M FROM PG")
ODDISEE: (Singing) I'm so independent. I do my own thing. I'm not a concept. I'm my own dream.
SYDELL: Oddisee says in today's fractured music culture, if you can find a thousand fans around the world to pay you $50 a year, you can make a living.
LAURA SYDELL, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
One of the best known voices of the 1960s is gone.
(Soundbite of song, "Please Mr. Postman")
T: Oh yes, wait a minute Mr. Postman, wait Mr. Postman.
NORRIS: Gladys Horton, co-founder and former lead singer of the Marvelettes, died last night at a California nursing home.
NPR's Allison Keyes has this remembrance.
ALLISON KEYES: Gladys Horton was just 15 when "Please Mr. Postman" rocketed onto the charts in 1961.
(Soundbite of song, "Please Mr. Postman")
THE MARVELETTES: There must be some word today from my boyfriend so far away. Please, Mr. Postman, look and see. Is there a letter, a letter for me?
KEYES: It was the first number one pop hit for the fledgling Motown label. Katherine Anderson Schaffner says the group got started at Inkster High School in suburban Detroit. She says Gladys got some fellow glee club members together when she heard about a talent show.
NORRIS: We sang in the talent show, but we didn't win.
KEYES: But the group still ended up auditioning at Motown. When the company asked them to come back with an original tune, they chose "Please Mr. Postman," and suddenly they had a huge hit. Schaffner says her friend was the heart of the group.
NORRIS: She was a very nice person, and she gave a lot and didn't ask for too much more than, you know, what she gave.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARVELETTES: (Singing) Beechwood 4-5789, you can call me up and have a date any old time.
KEYES: Horton sang lead for the group from 1961 through 1965 on hits including "Beechwood 4-5789" and "Playboy," before being replaced as lead by Wanda Young. But during their heyday, Horton and the Marvelettes made a huge mark.
NORRIS: They were the first girl group to become big stars at Motown.
KEYES: Billy Wilson is CEO of the Motown Alumni Association and says the Marvelettes not only pioneered the whole girl group concept, they were also touring without the benefit of the etiquette and grooming classes the record company used later to mold their acts into a polished product.
NORRIS: They had to get out there and buy their own clothes and, you know, create their own routines and almost everything. They had to do a lot of things by themselves.
KEYES: But Horton led them to a string of hits, keeping them on the charts consistently through most of the 1960s.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
MARVELETTES: (Singing) Look here girls, take this advice and remember always be nice. Into each heart, some tears must fall...
KEYES: Horton was born in 1944 in Detroit, Michigan, and raised by foster parents in suburban Inkster. She stayed with the Marvelettes from 1961 until 1967, when she left to have her first child.
In the 1980s, Gladys Horton did some gigs as Gladys Horton of the Marvelettes but had to first get the name back after Motown sold it. Katherine Schaffner says her friend was a fighter to the end.
NORRIS: She fought a good fight. I guess maybe last night she just gave up fighting.
KEYES: Gladys Horton was 66 years old. She is survived by two sons.
Allison Keyes, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Next Tuesday, New York governor, Andrew Cuomo, will unveil a plan to cut his state's budget deficit, which now stands at more than $11 billion. Cuomo is considering massive layoffs that could hit as many as 10,000 state workers. The state's prison system could face the deepest cuts.
As North Country Public Radio's Brian Mann reports, that's especially bad news for upstate New York, where prisons are a major source of jobs and unemployment tops 10 percent.
BRIAN MANN: When New York state announced it wanted to close the Lyon Mountain prison, which sits just south of the U.S.-Canada border, locals like Karen Linney were devastated.
KAREN LINNEY: There's no jobs anywhere. So we need to fight to keep this prison open or there's nothing.
MANN: Lyon Mountain used to be a mining town. But as factories and mines in this region closed in the 1960s and '70s, the state replaced them one by one with prisons.
BETTY LITTLE: The state understood that the economy in the North Country was hurting. We needed help.
MANN: That's state senator Betty Little, who spoke at a town meeting last year at the Lyon Mountain American Legion hall. Little's sprawling rural district has 13 state prisons, and she says they should all stay right where they are.
LITTLE: We built an economy around these facilities and there's absolutely nothing, nothing to replace those jobs.
MANN: Strange as it seems to outsiders, people here have long thought of prisons as an industry. Jobs behind bars are a kind of trade passed on from generation to generation. But their livelihood is being squeezed hard by two big changes. Crime rates in New York State plummeted over the last decade, and the number of inmates dropped 20 percent. Because the state eased mandatory drug sentences last year, the prison population is expected to shrink even more. The other big change is the state's deepening budget crisis.
In his State of the State address earlier this month, Governor Cuomo said using prisons to prop up rural economies is no longer affordable.
ANDREW CUOMO: An incarceration program is not an employment program. If people need jobs, let's get people jobs. Don't put other people in prison to give some people jobs. That's not what this state is all about. And that has to end this session.
(SOUNDBITE OF APPLAUSE)
MANN: Cuomo's announcement drew praise from prison reform advocates like Bob Gangi.
BOB GANGI: It's somewhat ironic that he says that's not what this state is all about, because that's what the state has been about for about the last 30 years.
MANN: Gangi says the old policy was too expensive. The Department of Correctional Services still employs nearly 19,000 prison guards statewide. Gangi argues that the system also created an economic incentive to lock up people who should have been in drug rehab or mental health counseling.
GANGI: One of the problems with using incarceration as a jobs program is the fundamental immorality of it.
MANN: But rural leaders in New York say their towns provide a needed service - housing and caring for the state's criminals. They accuse state officials of closing prisons hastily, with no plans for redevelopment.
Brian McDonnell has been working to help sell a prison mothballed in 2009 that sits smack in the middle of his community of Brighton, New York. He says the prison was abandoned and left in terrible shape.
BRIAN MCDONNELL: There was some black mold in several of the metal buildings. The state didn't do us any favors by just closing everything up.
MANN: Any new prison cuts announced Tuesday are sure to spark a major political fight in the state legislature. Avoiding closures may be impossible, given the budget crisis, but State Senator Betty Little says she hopes corrections facilities in these rural towns will be spared.
LITTLE: I certainly don't believe that we need to create inmates to fill prisons. But I do believe that when we decide to downsize, we need to look at the economic impact. It would be my hope that they would look in other areas of the state.
MANN: But prison guards like Chad Stickney are worried. He lives in Ogdensburg, New York, where there are actually two state prisons - one of them targeted for closure last year.
CHAD STICKNEY: We need to unite as every jail above Albany. Because that's where all these jails closures are coming from are above Albany. We need to rally as a whole.
MANN: The prison in Lyon Mountain closed its doors earlier this month, costing that tiny town more than 90 jobs.
For NPR News, I'm Brian Mann.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Now, back to our exploration of the fractured media. The growth of options on TV and the Internet has changed the way we consume culture. Take music videos. MTV has pretty much ditched them, because videos are all over YouTube. But music videos are still the heart and soul of the TV show "106 & Park" on BET.
NPR's Zoe Chace reports that the show's focus is on a specific fragment of the broader audience - young fans of hip-hop.
ZOE CHACE: Thirteen-year-old Zakkiayah Radney-Turner just got home from school.
ZAKKIAYAH RADNEY: I get a lot of homework and stuff. So it's fun when I get to go home, get my food, lay back, turn on the TV, and it's sort of like I'm at a party.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "106 & PARK")
BET: Welcome back to the show. You're watching BET's "106 & Park."
CHACE: Zakkiayah goes to North Star Academy in Newark, New Jersey. Her class of eighth graders is going to tell us why "106 & Park" is appointment watching.
First, Shaquan Nelson explains he likes the feeling of being in a crowd.
SHAQUAN NELSON: A dance, if you're doing it by yourself, it's just boring. Three people is boring. A hundred? It's kind of fun.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "106 & PARK")
BLOCK: Now I feel like (unintelligible).
NELSON: You're seeing people out there dancing with you, and you know that somebody out there looks on that show just like you do and you're doing the same dance that they're doing.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "106 & PARK")
Unidentified Woman: I'm loving it.
CHACE: Second, "106 & Park" is really just for young people.
As Imani Johnson gently points out, it's a safe place to escape from the cynicism of the over 21 set.
IMANI JOHNSON: Old and middle-aged, they always criticizing our music. Like, my mother, she always saying, I can't understand what you're all singing, and all those other stuff. So it's constant for us.
CHACE: But all this - the party, the escape from old people - doesn't account for "106 & Park" having its highest rated month ever in November. Possibly, the most important reason "106 & Park" is so popular is that it's on BET.
TERRENCE JENKINS: African-American culture and African-American trends...
CHACE: Mm-hmm.
JENKINS: ...and African-American lifestyle.
CHACE: Terrence Jenkins is the co-host.
JENKINS: You know, it is BET. It is Black Entertainment Television, and there's no other place on TV that caters to us, at the end of the day.
CHACE: Think about...
JAMAD THOMAS: If we go to MTV, VH-1 or you turn to like Channel E...
CHACE: Jamad Thomas is 13.
THOMAS: ...you don't really see that many shows where you can see your own people - African-Americans - having fun and have a lot of positivity.
CHACE: Jamad feels like he has to go to BET if he wants to see black teenagers front and center on television.
Now, to be clear, it can get a little racy on "106." Songs like "Birthday Sex" regularly appear on the countdown.
But on freestyle Friday...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "106 & PARK")
Unidentified Man: Guys, here are the rules. There are no cursing, no foul language, no sex or explicit lyrics.
CHACE: And you do see a diversity of faces and styles on the show, though not of ages. The oldest person is probably Eminem, who's 39.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "106 & PARK")
BLIND FURY: (Singing) Hey, (unintelligible).
CHACE: Amateur rapper Blind Fury has dominated the last four weeks. This kid would stand out in most crowds - a blind white adroit rapper in a red Yankee cap from rural South Carolina.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "106 & PARK")
FURY: (Rapping) Really want to talk how I kill them with the blind. Everybody what, see me kill him with the rhyme. I'mma come through and I'mma get them out of my mind. Everybody wants to see me when they see me on my grind. Yeah.
CHACE: The common denominator on "106 & Park" is hip-hop. If you don't like commercial hip-hop, you'd probably won't like this party. But if you do and you're in eighth grade, you might feel like this party is just for you.
Zoe Chace, NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
I'm Melissa Block.
BLOCK: Either make some politically painful decisions to keep those predictions from coming true, or they can risk a major debt crisis that could have painful consequences around the world. At a Senate Budget Committee hearing today on the new CBO report, the desire to do something was more evident than the path for getting it done.
NPR's David Welna reports.
DAVID WELNA: It was not a pretty picture that CBO director Douglas Elmendorf painted as he sat before the budget committee. This year's deficit, he said, will be nearly one and a half trillion dollars, nominally the largest in history. And if the tax breaks that got extended this year continue throughout the next decade, Elmendorf said the nation's debt would grow to be the size of its economy, something that hasn't happened since the end of World War II. The time to do something about it, he told the grim-faced panel of senators, is now.
NORRIS: The longer the necessary adjustments are delayed, the greater will be the negative consequences of the mounting debt, the more uncertain individuals and businesses will be about the future government policies, and the more drastic the ultimate policy changes will need to be.
WELNA: Texas Republican John Cornyn said dealing with the debt is not something Congress does well.
NORRIS: I feel like Mark Twain when he said everyone talks about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it.
WELNA: Kent Conrad, the budget committee's Democratic chairman, said this is not something Congress alone can resolve.
NORRIS: The thing that makes the most sense is there is a summit between the White House, leaders in the House and the Senate, because at the end of the day, the White House has got to be at the table. And unfortunately, the budget process, the president is left out.
WELNA: That's because the budget Congress approves each year is never sent to the president for his signature or veto. Republicans on the panel agreed that the president should be involved. Nevada's John Ensign said President Obama has the bully pulpit senators don't have.
NORRIS: If the president would lead, join the two parties together, we could do actually what's right for the American people.
WELNA: But Republicans also cast doubt on the president's resolve to slow the ballooning debt. Alabama's Jeff Sessions said Mr. Obama squandered an opportunity to make a case for really reining in the debt in this week's State of the Union Address.
NORRIS: To hear the president's remarks, one would think his speech had been written 10 years ago. They were disconnected from the reality of the debt crisis that we face.
WELNA: Republicans generally see spending cuts as the way to cut deficits. A rare exception was Idaho's Mike Crapo.
NORRIS: I personally very strongly believe that all aspects of the spending and revenue side of the equation must be on the table.
WELNA: The revenue side of the equation, of course, is taxes and raising them has been a taboo topic for most in the GOP. But the likely need for more revenues was underscored toward the end of today's hearing when chairman Conrad noted that the Social Security surplus that lawmakers have been raiding for years disappeared this year and instead, Social Security has started cashing in its IOUs with the Treasury.
NORRIS: So, the budget problem that presents us with, instead of having several hundred billion dollars a year coming in from Social Security that we could send somewhere else, those days are over. Those days are over.
WELNA: CBO director Elmendorf agreed. From now on, he said, Social Security will be another factor adding to the debt.
David Welna, NPR News, the Capitol.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
The East Coast is digging out from yet another major snowstorm. The last time New York City got this much snow, basic services were crippled for days. Well, this time, New York officials say they've learned their lesson, as NPR's Joel Rose reports.
JOEL ROSE: When the snow ended this morning, it left 19 inches in Central Park - a total very similar to the storm that walloped New York City just after Christmas. That was lost on no one at Mayor Michael Bloomberg's morning press conference, including the mayor himself.
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: We had, if you remember, 600 buses stuck. We had 200 ambulances stuck the last time. We had thousands and thousands of cars and trucks stuck. And so, plowing was almost impossible.
ROSE: Bloomberg was eager to contrast the December disaster with this latest storm. The mayor was all over local radio and TV this morning praising the city's response.
BLOOMBERG: This time people were already home by the time the snow really got bad, so there were very stuck cars, buses, trucks, whatever. Or we made decisions that prevented them from getting stuck.
ROSE: Like pulling all city buses off the streets just after midnight last night and bringing in private contractors to augment the city's plowing capabilities. In a city of eight million people, there are at least that many opinions about Bloomberg and the city's emergency response.
Pete Remandi(ph) shovels the sidewalk in front of his restaurant on 20th Street in Manhattan.
PETE REMANDI: I'm not so sure the snowstorm is as bad as the one right after Christmas 'cause - either that or the city has really come alive and doing a lot better job, one or the other.
ROSE: Juan Angulo(ph) of Queens thinks the city's reaction was better this time.
JUAN ANGULO: The streets were plowed when I left this morning, the house, trains were running no problem, my train anyway. Crowded, but, you know, it's New York. You got to do what you got to do, get to where you got to get to. A little snow ain't going to stop nobody.
ROSE: But not everyone is so impressed. While the streets of Midtown Manhattan might be passable, Presley Moses(ph) says it's a different story up in Harlem.
PRESLEY MOSES: I live uptown and it's, like, crazy up there. The sidewalk is full of snow.
ROSE: So were many streets, even in midtown.
(SOUNDBITE OF STREETS)
ROSE: Rob French(ph) was one of several strangers who picked up a shovel to help dislodge a Yellow Cab that was stuck in the middle of 22nd Street.
ROB FRENCH: Because I live in New York and if I was the cabby, I would love it if somebody helped me as well. I work at a business here, I need trucks to go through also to deliver my stuff, so it matters to get cars out of here.
ROSE: Mayor Bloomberg caught some heat for canceling school on a day when thousands of students were scheduled to take state achievement tests. That left lots of parents scrambling to find something to do with their kids. But Zack Caplan(ph) of Brooklyn didn't mind. His kid spent the snow day in Prospect Park.
ZACK CAPLAN: They're out with about 10 friends sleigh riding, running around in the snow. And hopefully I'll get out of here and go see them.
ROSE: Caplan gave the workers at his construction company the day off. But they were the lucky ones. For a lot of New Yorkers, today it was just another work day.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
There was a strange occurrence today in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore. According to police, an employee with the U.S. consulate shot and killed two suspected gunmen as they approached his car on a congested street.
NPR's Julie McCarthy reports from Islamabad that the facts are still being established but the incident is likely to aggravate anti-American sentiments in Pakistan.
JULIE MCCARTHY: The American consulate employee, whose name has not been released by the U.S. Embassy, told eyewitnesses that he fired his pistol in self defense.
Local police, reconstructing the scene, say that the American had been driving alone through central Lahore in an unmarked Honda Civic. Two men on a motorcycle approached his car.
Police Officer Umar Sayeed(ph) said, based on eyewitness accounts, the American began shooting after one of the men pointed a gun at him.
One theory is that the motorcyclists were street robbers, and that this incident was an attempted robbery gone bad. Police say scores of similar attacks take place daily on the streets of Lahore, a city of an estimated 10 million people that sits near the Indian border. Foreigners would be perceived as lucrative targets in this economically distressed country.
The incident is likely to stoke even deeper anti-American anger here. Retired Pakistani Ambassador Zafar Hilali says using this as a pretext to stir emotions against the United States would be a serious misreading of the facts as they are known so far.
ZAFAR HILALI: There will always be elements who will try and play it up and take advantage of it and make it into an anti- American thing. Yes, of course there will be. But I don't think that the mass, the thinking public will give it another thought. I mean, he acted within his rights, if indeed what happened is what he said happened.
MCCARTHY: But there was a third death by the time the incident played out. Local media report that the American called colleagues for help immediately after the shooting. Eyewitnesses told police that a second vehicle sped to the scene, an SUV, and ran over a pedestrian. Obaid ur-Rehman was the third fatality of the day.
The American involved in the fatal shooting was taken for questioning. Families of two of the dead men have registered formal complaints with police, the first step in a criminal proceeding here.
International relations professor Rasul Bakhsh Rais(ph) says news organizations have given sensational coverage to the event, and are likely to fuel public anti-U.S. rage.
RASUL BAKHSH RAIS: And I don't think they are using their power with responsibility at all, because the tilt that they have given to the story has already loaded the public sentiment against the American.
MCCARTHY: With the State Department worried about fallout from the shooting, Spokesman P.J. Crowley said the U.S. understood the sensitivities.
CROWLEY: We want to make sure that a tragedy like this does not affect the strategic partnership that we're building with Pakistan. And we'll work as hard as we can to explain that to the Pakistan people.
MCCARTHY: A small demonstration at the site of the shooting erupted this evening to protest the killings, as investigators worked into the night to determine exactly what happened.
Julie McCarthy NPR News, Islamabad.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
In Egypt, anti-government protesters took to the streets for a third straight day, defying a government ban. They're calling for a mass rally tomorrow, after Friday prayers.
The activists, many of them young, educated Egyptians, have been demanding a number of reforms, including a higher minimum wage and an end to the state of emergency. Many are going further, calling for an end to the regime of President Hosni Mubarak. He's been in power since 1981. He's now 82 years old.
For some background on what Mubarak's presidency has meant for Egypt, we've brought in Shibley Telhami. He's professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of Maryland. Thanks for coming in.
P: My pleasure.
BLOCK: These three decades that Hosni Mubarak has been in power, how would you characterize this regime? You can see privately in diplomatic cables that U.S. officials call him a dictator. How would you describe...
P: Well, he's definitely an autocrat. There's no question that he's the central authority. Egypt has certain freedoms that are allowed, including more freedom of expression than many states that we consider dictatorships. But there is no question that the bulk of the decisions pertaining to national security, to foreign policy, to the constitution of the government are in the hands, ultimately, of the president.
And so, in that sense there's a lot of frustration, particularly among the new generation, that want to see change. They know something is going to happen, needs to happen. They don't think it's going to happen under this government and they don't know when the transition will happen. And they don't know what will follow the transition. So there is that kind of frustration that is very pervasive across the different segments of Egyptian society.
BLOCK: One of the demands of the protestors is an end to Emergency Law. What does Emergency Law in Egypt mean? What has that translated to?
P: It suspends a lot of freedoms that - a lot of rights just come out of the constitution. But it also gives state security free hand in arresting people and holding them, and in preempting organizations or events that are threatening to the state. So, clearly that has been an issue.
BLOCK: In the three decades that Hosni Mubarak has been president, have you seen Egypt change? How has Egypt changed?
P: No question. Every decade has been different, really. The 1980s were a very important decade because Mubarak established himself as a credible leader who was able to bring about stability following the assassination of Sadat. He brought Egypt back to the Arab fold. He started opening up the economy. In the 1990s, he benefited from globalization, Egyptian integration into the global economy, the role he was playing at a time when peace was possible.
But really, by the late 1990s and since then, there's been stagnation both in terms of how Egyptians see the role of Egypt in the region at the expense of other players, as well as internally. And there's been a lot of pressure and we know that had predated anything the U.S. had done, there was an indigenous democratic movement within Egypt itself.
BLOCK: Hosni Mubarak rose up through the military. How vital is the military in supporting his regime?
P: Absolutely critical. I think there's no question that the military is an anchor of the Egyptian government right now. After all, it was a military coup in 1952, and to this day, it's absolutely central.
BLOCK: If you look at who's protesting, it does seem to be quite widespread, it's not just youth. It's women, it's the middle-class, it's students, it's the under class, and it's not just in Cairo. Are you surprised by the wide - the broad nature of that opposition movement?
P: Yes, I am. And what makes it more effective and harder to deal with is that it's decentralized. And when you have - if it were a Muslim Brotherhood kind of initiative, you know exactly who to go after. You arrest leaders. You go after groups. You can break the organization, and that's what has happened in the past.
Now, when it's faceless, when it's nameless, you don't know how to deal with it. You're at a loss where to start.
BLOCK: Tonight, a key opposition figure, Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Prize as a nuclear watchdog, returned to Egypt. And he's calling for regime change as a leader of the opposition. Does he have widespread support, do you think?
P: You know, a lot of people rallied behind him, particularly when they're hoping that somebody would run against the president, in the context of an orderly election that would compete with President Mubarak. Now, that is very different from seeing someone as a leader of a change in a completely changed environment, where they're going to the extent of calling for, essentially, the removal of the president.
There's a lot at stake for him. We'll see how he plays his cards. We'll see how people respond to him.
BLOCK: Shibley Telhami, thanks for coming in.
P: A pleasure.
BLOCK: Shibley Telhami is professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics at the University of Maryland.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Bradley Manning, the soldier suspected of passing secret government files to WikiLeaks, has now spent six months in the brig. He's being held at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia.
To some, Manning is a traitor. To others, he's a hero, along with WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange. But both face possible criminal prosecution.
NPR's Tom Gjelten has the latest.
TOM GJELTEN: Private First Class Manning is held in what the military calls Prevention of Injury status, supposedly because he's a threat to himself. According to some reports, Manning has been depressed. He's held alone in his cell for 23 hours a day under constant surveillance. His lawyer last weekend filed a complaint objecting to Manning's treatment.
That prompted this reaction yesterday from Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.
GEOFF MORRELL: He's being provided well-balanced, nutritious meals three times a day. He receives visitors and mail, and can write letters. He routinely meets with doctors, as well as his attorney. He's allowed to make telephone calls. And he is being treated just like every other detainee in the brig.
GJELTEN: Manning's lawyer immediately pointed out no other prisoner at Quantico is being held in a prevention-of-injury status.
POST: Assange has not been formally charged. Swedish authorities have sought his extradition for questioning in relation to an alleged sexual assault.]
Assange has his own theory for why Bradley Manning may be getting harsh treatment. He thinks Manning is being pressured to say Assange encouraged him to steal secret government files. Here's Assange on MSNBC last month.
JULIAN ASSANGE: We've recently heard calls to try and set up a plea deal with Bradley Manning to testify against me, personally, to say that we engaged in some kind of conspiracy to commit espionage. Absolute nonsense.
GJELTEN: In fact, the U.S. government is right now looking to see whether Assange might be prosecuted in this country for his release of classified files. If it could be shown that Assange communicated with Manning about the theft of secret documents, that might be one basis for prosecution.
NBC News this week reported that investigators have been looking for evidence of a connection between Manning and Assange and have not yet found it.
In his MSNBC interview, Assange said that people who leak secrets to his WikiLeaks group do so anonymously and that he had no conversations with Bradley Manning about leaking documents.
ASSANGE: That's not how our technology works, not how our organization works. I'd never heard of the name Bradley Manning before it appeared in the media.
GJELTEN: At the Pentagon, yesterday, spokesman Geoff Morrell bristled when asked about the report of investigators finding no connection between Manning and Assange.
MORRELL: Any pronouncements about a connection or lack of a connection, those that have been found or yet to be found, are just premature at this point.
GJELTEN: If Assange were himself not a party to the theft of the classified U.S. files, he'd presumably have to be charged simply for publishing them. Difficult but not impossible, says Jeffrey Smith, a former CIA general counsel.
JEFFREY SMITH: It would arguably be made easier if they could establish a link between the removal of the documents by Manning and the transmission of those documents to Assange, but I don't think the absence of that link is fatal to the prosecution of Assange.
GJELTEN: So far, there's no indication the U.S. government is thinking of charging the New York Times with espionage, though the newspaper, like WikiLeaks, did publish the stolen classified files. Prosecuting a news organization like that would be virtually without precedent.
If government lawyers go after WikiLeaks, they'll probably say it's not a news organization. And they'll have the New York Times to back them up. In an article released on its website, Times editor Bill Keller writes that the newspaper has regarded Assange, quote, as a source, not as a partner or collaborator.
Tom Gjelten, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Police in London say they're opening a new investigation into the activities of journalists at a popular British tabloid newspaper. Reporters at The News of the World are said to have made a habit of listening to the voicemail of members of the royal family, media celebrities and senior politicians.
As NPR's Philip Reeves reports, the case is causing a ripple of alarm in some high places.
PHILIP REEVES: The British don't much like journalists. Sure, millions of them read the tabloid papers, happily gorging themselves on the exploits of cavorting country vicars, coke-sniffing celebrities, and double-dealing politicians.
Yet, they generally see the reporters who hunt down this stuff as muckrakers. So you won't find many Britons shedding a tear today over the latest misfortune to visit their hugely popular Sunday tabloid, The News of the World.
The scandal goes back quite a while, so let's recap. Four years ago, the News of the World's royal correspondent and a private detective were jailed for hacking into voicemail boxes used by aides to the royal family.
The paper's executives insisted these two were the only ones involved in phone-hacking at the paper. A lot of people weren't at all convinced. There was a drip-feed of reports suggesting plenty of others knew about the practice.
The plot's just thickened. The News of the World says it's canned a senior editor after going through his emails. It says it's handed fresh evidence to the police. The cops have responded by promising a new investigation.
People now want to know if the police will confirm what everyone else suspects, that phone-hacking is in fact widespread in Fleet Street, the name still used for the British national press.
The celebrity publicist, Max Clifford, himself a victim of The News of the World phone snoops, says the new police probe could prove very significant.
NORRIS: In layman's terms, basically I suppose it's a volcano, and it's now starting to erupt. And I think the ramifications of what might appear if the police get to the truth will be felt all over Fleet Street.
REEVES: And not just Fleet Street. This case is causing some big headaches elsewhere. The News of the World is part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. His News International Corporation already owns a big chunk of the British media.
Murdoch's trying to persuade the British authorities to let him have still more, by allowing him complete ownership of the prize satellite TV company, BSkyB. Allegations of skullduggery within his stable aren't helping Murdoch's case.
Spare a thought, too, for the cops over at Scotland Yard. They're feeling the heat, too. London's Metropolitan Police has long had a very cozy relationship with Fleet Street. Many people believe that's why the police haven't properly investigated the phone-hacking scandal after all these years.
John Prescott, Britain's former deputy prime minister, believes he was a victim of phone-hacking. He thinks the cops haven't really been trying.
NORRIS: Now we have evidence the police didn't carry out their proper job. Now we've got Murdoch deciding he wants to clear the ground, so he throws a few of his people to the wolves on evidence that the police already had.
REEVES: This is even a little uncomfortable for Britain's prime minister, David Cameron. Cameron's communications chief, Andy Coulson, suddenly quit his job Friday. Why does that matter? Because Coulson was the editor of The News of the World when the scandal broke. Coulson's always denied knowing anything about any phone hacking on his watch, a position he still maintains.
One group is happy, though. As Britain's aggrieved celebrities and politicians line up to sue for damages, there'll be lawyers rubbing their hands in glee.
Philip Reeves, NPR News, London.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
The official commission tasked with finding the root causes of the financial crisis issued not one but three reports today. All of the Democratic appointees on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission backed its official report, but the Republican appointees produced two separate dissents.
NPR's John Ydstie has the story.
JOHN YDSTIE: The commission which was mandated by Congress spent a year investigating the meltdown. It examined over a million pages of material, interviewed more than 700 people and held 19 public hearings.
Chairman Phil Angelides kicked off the commission's news conference.
PHIL ANGELIDES: This financial crisis could have been avoided. Let us be clear. This calamity was the result of human action, inaction and misjudgment.
YDSTIE: Angelides and other Democratic members of the commission went on to catalog the failures of Wall Street titans and government policymakers and regulators.
ANGELIDES: This report documents specific instances where leaders did not take action to stamp out smoldering threats that eventually led to financial crisis.
YDSTIE: And the commission names names. It points out that just before Bear Stearns collapsed, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox expressed comfort about the capital cushions at Wall Street firms. It reminds us that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reassured the public that the turmoil in the subprime mortgage market could be contained.
But the stage for the crisis was set in the two preceding decades, according to the commission, as belief in the self-correcting nature of markets and the ability of financial firms to police themselves became widely accepted.
Here's commission member John Thompson who's chairman of Symantec.
JOHN THOMPSON: This misplaced confidence in deregulation of a highly competitive industry was championed by the former Federal Reserve chairman, Alan Greenspan, and others and supported by successive administrations and Congresses.
YDSTIE: But while the Democrats on the commission believe that inadequate government regulation was a major cause of the crisis, Republican dissenter Peter Wallison, a former Reagan administration official, disagrees. Wallison, now at the American Enterprise Institute, argues government activism in the housing market caused the problem. He says any serious analysis of the crisis needs to focus on the fundamental issue: subprime mortgages that defaulted by the millions.
PETER WALLISON: All of these very weak mortgages were stuffed into our financial system because of government policy.
YDSTIE: Wallison argues that the government's affordable housing policies required financial institutions to make a high percentage of loans to financially-challenged borrowers. By 2008, he says, half the mortgages in the system were questionable.
WALLISON: That was completely ignored by the commission, even though that information was provided to them.
YDSTIE: Three other Republicans on the commission cited different reasons. In their dissent, they argued that the global nature of the crisis undercuts the notion that U.S. government housing policy or lack of regulation caused the crisis.
With the major overhaul of financial regulation already signed into law, the commissioners faced questions about whether their efforts would have much effect. They argued there's still lots of room for reform. The commission's work may also provide business for the courts. Angelides says it has made several referrals to legal authorities for investigation.
The commission's many documents and interviews will also provide journalists and historians with material. Here's one example. In his interview with the commission, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said at one point during the crisis 12 of the 13 most important financial firms in the country were at risk of failure.
John Ydstie, NPR News, Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
We're going to hear now from two members of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. In a moment, Chairman Phil Angelides, a Democrat, but first, with one of the reports two dissenting opinions, we're joined by Douglas Holtz-Eakin. He was appointed by Republicans to serve on the commission.
Thanks so much for coming in.
DOUGLAS HOLTZ: Thanks for having me.
NORRIS: You seem to argue in justifying your defense that the majority opinion is oversimplified and, in part, politically motivated. Explain what you mean by that.
HOLTZ: Well, we certainly wanted to steer the public away from any notion that there are simple explanations for the financial crisis: either it's Wall Street greed on one hand, or you often hear it's all the government's fault with their housing regulations.
Our view is that if you take serious the idea that you look for those things, without which we wouldn't have had a crisis, you come up with a very complicated picture, and our writings are intended to convey that.
NORRIS: I want to follow up on one of the key differences between the majority opinion and yours, the idea that 2008 was not just an American meltdown but a global meltdown. Help me understand why you think that's important because that's one of the things you really highlight in your dissent.
HOLTZ: It's a key difference between us and the majority. The majority is very U.S.-centric. The majority report does not talk at all about the credit bubble. We had a credit bubble and a housing bubble...
NORRIS: The international credit bubble.
HOLTZ: ...in France...
NORRIS: Mm-hmm.
HOLTZ: ...in Spain, in Ireland, in England. And those bubbles happened in circumstances of very different financial supervision than the United States, and they had very different, you know, political economy. You know, one of the majority's view is that, you know, Wall Street went to Washington and lobbied for lax regulation. Well, if the same thing is going on around the world, you have to look for deeper causes.
NORRIS: In your opinion, you write that the amount of financial regulation should reflect the need to address particular failures in the financial system. My question is, if we wait for failure to determine what regulators should be doing, then how can we prevent the next Lehman or the next Bear Stearns?
HOLTZ: There's some parts of financial supervision we know about. We know, for example, that the more leverage you have, the more exposed you're going to be, and so all of financial regulation supervision is always centered on safety and soundness. So that's not new, and we should continue to do that. But we learned some things in this crisis, like having access to cash, liquidity management, that I think it will be higher on the list going forward.
NORRIS: What about understanding the markets, though? Because it seems that the people who were responsible for regulating the markets didn't really understand these, you know, very complex collateralized debt systems that were created, that helped lead to this crisis. The system got ahead of the regulators.
HOLTZ: And the presumption is then that regulators can always know enough to stop stuff, and I think that's a question that remains open. If you want to regulate so severely that you'll never have a crisis, you're also never going to have a financial system.
NORRIS: At the beginning of this process, we had commissioners come in and speak to us...
HOLTZ: Mm-hmm.
NORRIS: ...and we had someone who was a Republican and someone who's a Democrat, and they talked quite a bit at that point about how there was going to be a lot of bipartisanship. And in the end, they were going to produce a report that the public and the government could trust. In this case - at the end of this process, there's a good degree of dissent, we're speaking to you...
HOLTZ: Mm-hmm.
NORRIS: ...we'll speak with chairman Phil Angelides. You're not in here together because you don't agree. Are you concerned that people will dismiss this report because of the obvious contention in the process?
HOLTZ: They may or may not. That's their judgment. What we will leave behind and what the staff, in particular, is to be congratulated for is an archive of extraordinary information of the testimony in the hearings, of the subpoenas and the documents we acquired. And I believe that's the lasting legacy of this commission. And I at least, you know, find comfort in the fact that Ph.D. economists - we've been studying the Great Depression for well over 70 years. We still disagree about what went on. I never expected instant agreement on what caused the most recent financial crisis, and if we got it, we were probably wrong.
NORRIS: Douglas Holtz-Eakin was appointed by the Republicans to serve as a commissioner on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
Thanks so much for coming in.
HOLTZ: Thank you.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
Now, to the commission's Democratic chairman, Phil Angelides.
Mr. Angelides, welcome back to the program.
PHIL ANGELIDES: It's always good to be with you.
NORRIS: Now, one thing I have to ask you since when we began this process we talked to you and Bill Thomas together and you had talked about bipartisanship in that moment. How is it that at the end of this process, there is so much dissent: two separate reports, two very different views of history?
ANGELIDES: Here's what I would say. If you look at the report we issued, it is a fact-based report. Of the 500-and-some pages, 490 pages are the actual evidence of the events that occurred in this financial crisis.
If there is a division here, I think it's a pretty fundamental one, and that is that the majority that adopted the commission's report came to the conclusion that this crisis was avoidable.
It was the result of human actions, inactions and misjudgments. And I will say that the dissent did indicate that they found areas of agreement with the majority's conclusions, but we do separate on the issue of avoidability. We don't think this needed to happen.
NORRIS: In your news conference this morning, you sidestepped an important matter, the matter of criminal prosecutions. Can't you at least give us some sense of how many criminal referrals you made to prosecutors?
ANGELIDES: So first of all take into account we are not a prosecutorial body. But we were charged by the law with if we found potential violations of law, we were to refer those matters to the attorney general or the appropriate state attorney general.
And I will just say on this matter that we did our duty. And as a matter of judicial fairness, it is now in the hands of prosecutors to determine whether any laws have been broken.
NORRIS: How many referrals did you make?
ANGELIDES: I really can't comment on that. It really is something that has to be handled with the utmost of judiciousness and fairness.
NORRIS: The folks who have written the dissent say that your report and its conclusions are oversimplifying the problem and the causes of the financial meltdown.
They say that you have to take into account what was going on globally, that there was too much cheap money, much of it coming from Asia, and that other countries were also experiencing a housing bubble, and that should be - and that that should be taken into account in trying to understand what happened in this country.
ANGELIDES: And we did do that. If you look at the report, we did examine international capital flows. We examined foreign investment in this country. We examined how defective subprime securities were exported from the U.S. to European banks.
But we also came to the conclusion that just because you have a lot of money in the system doesn't mean you're doomed to have a crisis. But we also don't take the view that we're just fated to have happen in this country what will happen. I mean, that's a view that essentially dooms us to a repeat of the crisis.
NORRIS: Mr. Angelides, Congress has already passed the Dodd-Frank Bill to overhaul financial regulation. As detailed and specific as this report is, don't you worry that it's arriving a bit too late to have any kind of effect on the political debate or on policy?
ANGELIDES: Well, I believe there's a conscious effort right now to, in a sense, rewrite history, to take a - to view this as a bump in the road, or the quote-unquote "stuff happens" theory. I think our report, as it turns out, will be very timely.
The financial system in this country is almost unchanged from the eve of the crisis. In the 1930s, it took a decade to reform our financial system. This nation has just begun its examination of what went wrong, and I hope that our report is not the last word. And I hope that our report is looked at by the president, by the Congress, by regulators in determining what more needs to be done and what needs to be done to implement the laws that are on the books.
NORRIS: Mr. Angelides, thank you very much for speaking with us.
ANGELIDES: Thank you very much, Michele.
NORRIS: Phil Angelides is the Democratic chairman of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
In Tunisia, the interim government is struggling to establish legitimacy. Today, it removed from the Cabinet nearly all of the ministers associated with the former president, the autocrat Ben Ali. He fled the country two weeks ago.
It's not clear the Cabinet reshuffling will satisfy protesters. In the meantime, human rights groups are warning that the structure of state repression is still very much in place. NPR's Eric Westervelt sent this report from Tunis.
(SOUNDBITE OF YELLING AND WHISTLING)
ERIC WESTERVELT: As school let out today, thousands of young people again poured into the historic Kasbah or old city and headed toward government square, trying to reach the several thousand protesters who've camped out for days outside the prime minister's office.
In today's Cabinet reshuffle, the foreign, defense, justice, and interior ministers and others were replaced. Most were allies of Zine al Abidine Ben Ali and long-time members of his now discredited RCD party.
However, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi, also a Ben Ali ally, will stay. Twenty-three-year-old student Nidal Marzougi says it's not enough, that protesters want all former members of the RCD, including the prime minister, out. If not, he fears that Ben Ali cronies will try to steal any election.
NIDAL MARZOUGI: And they will come to power again. We want them all out. They governed our country from 1956. They just give no democracy. They give us nothing. They just want all these people to calm down and to accept their injustice again.
WESTERVELT: Meanwhile activists are warning that the machinery of Ben Ali's police state is still very much in place. Lawyer Seehahm Ben Sidreen directs the once-outlawed Tunisian National Council for Liberty. She did jail time in 2001 for speaking out against torture, repression, injustice and tight media control under Ben Ali.
SEEHAHM BEN SIDREEN: The police machine was the main body Ben Ali used to run the country, and this body is still there. They are still inside.
WESTERVELT: For example, she says, even today the political police are still monitoring her office, checking who is coming and going. They've been a little more low-key, she says, but not much. She fears little has changed in the oppressive interior ministry.
This week, officers even harassed one of her clients. Ben Sidreen says the 20-something student had filed a complaint with her that he'd been beaten and tortured by the secret police the day before Ben Ali fled. She says plainclothes security men confronted the man just after he left her office.
BEN SIDREEN: They followed him, they stopped him, and they told him do not go again there, it's not good for you. They are still here. My phone is still tapped. My emails are still confiscated. The cyber-police is still there.
WESTERVELT: Tunisians say Ben Ali's muhabarat, or secret police, penetrated every facet of society: People were followed, monitored and sent the message: Don't try anything, don't dissent, we know what you're doing and where you are.
Tunisians complain that the EU and the U.S. largely looked the other way. They liked Ben Ali's tough-on-terror stance. But you didn't have to threaten violence to get jailed here; just about any young person who openly expressed Islamist sympathizes here faced interrogation or prison.
Fear that the security hydra might now easily rear its head again is shared by Eric Goldstine of Human Rights Watch. He's here in Tunisia investigating abuses under Ben Ali's regime.
ERIC GOLDSTINE: The people I talk to don't say they're gone. They just say they're just lying low, and they still have their weapons. And that's why it is so important for this country to fully document the things that took place over the last month: the killings, the shooting people in the back, the torture that took place up until the day that Ben Ali left.
WESTERVELT: Activist Ben Sidreen says a widespread purging of the security forces is vital and needs to be done soon, especially if new elections are to be credible, free and fair.
In addition, she says, many more security members need to be held accountable, not just the six slated for eventual trial.
BEN SIDREEN: They tortured, they killed, they did criminal things, and they have to face justice.
WESTERVELT: We might eventually need some kind of truth and reconciliation commission, she says, but adds, that should never be a substitute for justice.
Eric Westervelt, NPR News, Tunis.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Those protests in Tunisia have rippled outward in the Arab world, first to Egypt and now to Yemen. Today, thousands of Yemenis protested in the streets of the capital, Sana'a. And Washington Post correspondent Sudarsan Raghavan is there. Sudarsan, you described this rally today as peaceful. Who's out in the streets protesting?
SUDARSAN RAGHAVAN: Well, it's a pretty boisterous mix of opposition party members, including socialists and Islamists, teachers, professors, students, poor, unemployed workers. So it was a very diverse crowd.
BLOCK: So a widespread demonstration. What are the demands?
RAGHAVAN: Well, people are absolutely frustrated about the high unemployment, the low wages, rising prices of food, transportation and widespread corruption. Many were calling for President Ali Abdullah Saleh to step down from power. And after 32 years in power, they feel it's a time for change.
BLOCK: How strong, how stable would you say the Yemeni government is?
RAGHAVAN: Well, the Yemeni government is quite weak. It controls few areas outside of the capital, where tribal leaders rule. They're facing a rebellion in the north. There's also a secessionist movement in the south. And on top of that all, they're facing a threat from a resurgent al-Qaida affiliate, which is increasingly turning Yemen into a base to target the West and its allies.
BLOCK: So how do you see this resolving itself? I mean, could this be just the final blow to a government that you describe as really week?
RAGHAVAN: Well, what was interesting about the protest today is how peaceful and organized they were, unlike the ones in Tunisia and in Egypt, where we saw clashes between the police and activists. There was none of that today.
In fact, as protestors are leaving a number of them ringed - clasped their hands together and made a ring around the soldiers to prevent any demonstrators from attacking the soldiers.
So in a way it's sort of a slow-burning protest movement. For instance, you know, they're not planning to protest tomorrow. In fact, they plan to protest next week.
BLOCK: So in terms of replacing the government as they're demanding, you don't think that's on the horizon, right now at least?
RAGHAVAN: I mean, the government is trying its best to appease the protestors. President Saleh, in a televised speech, said he would raise the salaries of soldiers, cut income taxes and also promised that he would not anoint his son as his successor, all from the demands of the protestors.
Certainly, you know, this is a military state, and the army is working with the government. So it's really unclear what's going to happen in the future. Some protestors are telling me that they aren't concerned about a crackdown like what's happening in Egypt. Others say that they're going to continue pressing forward no matter what happens until they get change.
BLOCK: I've been talking with Washington Post correspondent Sudarsan Raghavan. He's in Sana'a, the capital of Yemen.
Sudarsan, thanks very much.
MELISSA BLOCK, Host:
Lawmakers in Utah are considering a new state symbol - an official firearm. It would be a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol invented by John Browning, who was born in Utah. It's been used by the military and police for a century.
But given the mass shooting in Tucson, some in Utah are wondering whether an official state gun is appropriate.
NPR's Howard Berkes lays out the debate as it unfolded yesterday in the statehouse.
HOWARD BERKES: Republican State Representative Carl Wimmer stood on the Utah House floor presenting an official state firearm as a benign and historic honor. The Browning M1911 semiautomatic handgun deserves official recognition, he said, just like the Dutch oven, the official state cooking pot.
CARL WIMMER: This firearm was created by John Moses Browning, who was a son of Utah pioneers, grew up in Ogden. This firearm really has defended liberty and freedom around the country and around the world. And I think that this is a very appropriate designation to capture a portion of state history.
BERKES: Guns are a big deal in Utah. The state has some of the most permissive gun laws in the country, and the rest of the country takes notice.
Last year, Utah issued more than 50,000 concealed weapons permits to people who don't even live in the state. That's more than triple the number issued to Utahans.
Gun rights advocates are a powerful political force here, as Democratic Representative Carol Spackman Moss noted when she spoke on the House floor.
CAROL SPACKMAN MOSS: When I was first elected to this office, someone gave me this advice: Don't ever speak against guns, and now I'm going to break this advice.
BERKES: Moss said she had a hard time imagining school kids drawing and coloring the official Utah state symbols - the delicate sego lily, the majestic Rocky Mountain elk, the tasty sugar beet - and then turning to a lethal .45-caliber handgun.
SPACKMAN MOSS: It seems insensitive to me at this time when many people are mourning the deaths of six people in Tucson. Many people have a negative experience with guns because guns do kill people in the hands of those who use them wrongly or deranged individuals, but nevertheless, guns do kill.
BERKES: Moss named three people she knew who were victims of gun violence, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, a friend, and there were two cousins - one, a soldier two weeks away from discharge at Fort Hood in Texas; the other, a teenager gazing at the stars with a friend when a thrill-seeker shot them both.
A Democratic colleague added that state symbols are supposed to unify, but guns polarize.
Republican Wimmer was given the last word.
WIMMER: There is a huge difference between the actions of a madman using a firearm, which is neither good nor bad - a firearm is just an object. It's neither good nor bad. There's a big difference between patriots using a firearm to defend our country.
BERKES: And with that, the Utah House of Representatives voted.
BERKES: Voting will be open on House Bill 219, State Firearm Designation.
BERKES: The measure passed by a 3-to-1 margin. Now, it goes to the State Senate, where it's also expected to pass given Utah's gun and political cultures.
The National Conference of State Legislatures says it has no record of an official state firearm anywhere so Utah seems poised to become the first state in the nation to choose a handgun as an enduring symbol.
Howard Berkes, NPR News, Salt Lake City.
MICHELE NORRIS, Host:
The White House is trying to make this year's State of the Union Address a two- way street. Senior White House officials responded to questions online after the speech Tuesday. Spokesman Robert Gibbs did a question and answer session on Twitter on yesterday. And, today, President Obama answered questions on YouTube.
NPR's Ari Shapiro was following the online town hall and joins me now. Ari, what was the main focus of today's event?
ARI SHAPIRO: Well, it hit a lot of the major themes from the State of the Union Address. The president talked about infrastructure, about education, immigration. But like in that speech, his main focus today was jobs. The first question came from an infantryman in Akron, Ohio who had just returned from his second tour of Afghanistan. He's now out of work and wanted to know where the jobs are. Here's what President Obama said, in audio that was a little glitchy, but you can hear what he's saying anyway.
BARACK OBAMA: We are making a big push with employers to say, these folks have shown leadership, they have been trained, they have performed at high levels in very difficult situations, they're going to be great assets to help rebuild the country.
SHAPIRO: As this was YouTube, there were a lot of questions from young people and many of them were asking about jobs. The president kept pointing to job growth numbers from the last two years that are, as he put it, smaller than anyone would like.
OBAMA: The overall jobs picture is still very tough out there. We created a million, point - 1,300,000 jobs last year in the private sector, which is a lot better than we had been doing. But it's still not enough.
SHAPIRO: You keep hearing this tension between the president's plan to create jobs and the frustration with Americans that right now the jobs just simply do not exist yet.
NORRIS: Ari, we just heard from David - as we just heard from David Welna, there's been a lot of talk this week about cutting deficits. Did that issue come up?
SHAPIRO: It did, but the president didn't offer much more detail than in the State of the Union Address. At one point the president even gave an answer to a question that was less specific than the interviewer Steve Grove would have liked and so, Steve Grove of YouTube followed up. Here's what they said.
STEVE GROVE: What sorts of things, what sorts of programs do you think need to be cut?
OBAMA: Well, you know, we're going to be announcing our budget, so I don't want to give too much details because then nobody pays attention when we actually put the numbers out.
SHAPIRO: Eventually President Obama said he wants to use a scalpel rather than a chainsaw, implying, of course, that the Republican approach is the chainsaw one.
NORRIS: And what about questions about foreign affairs?
SHAPIRO: Well, Egypt is the big issue of the moment where protestors are marching in the streets and the president and the White House are trying to walk a tightrope here, where President Hosni Mubarak, who has been in power for decades is an ally of the United States. At the same time, the U.S. would like Mubarak to give his people more freedoms. So the president is trying not to take sides. Here's what he said today.
OBAMA: I think that it is very important that people have mechanisms in order to express legitimate grievances. As I said in my State of the Union speech, there are certain core values that we believe in as Americans that we believe are universal - freedom of speech, freedom of expression.
NORRIS: Ari, how does this fit into the White House's larger strategy right now?
SHAPIRO: Well, it's part of a reshuffle, the latest element of which came just this afternoon. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, who we learned some weeks ago would be stepping down, is going to be replaced by Jay Carney. He has been the vice president's chief spokesman. Before that, he covered the White House for Time magazine.
And that's part of a much broader reshuffle in which David Plouffe, who orchestrated the 2008 campaign, came in to replace David Axelrod. You have Bill Daley, the new chief of staff, who has strong ties to the business community. And so, in many ways we're seeing kind of Obama 2.0, the stronger ties to the business community, the greater emphasis on social media. And some of this Obama 2.0 has echoes of Obama the campaigner from 2008.
NORRIS: And Jay Carney brings with him a strong foreign policy docket as well.
SHAPIRO: That's right. It is sort of a truism in Washington that when Congress is controlled by the opposing party, the president has more power in foreign affairs than he might in domestic affairs. And so, we may see more of an emphasis on those foreign affairs going forward.
NORRIS: Thank you, Ari.
SHAPIRO: You're welcome.
NORRIS: That's NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
An animal quiz now. What do you think is making this sound?
(Soundbite of cheetahs chirping)
BLOCK: A bird? Maybe a gecko? No, that chirping is coming from baby cheetahs, fuzzy, grayish-gold cubs with dark spots on their legs and bellies and oversized claws
Ms. ADRIENNE CROSIER (Cheetah Biologist, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute): She was growling at me the other day, which was very cute. She's four pounds of fury.
BLOCK: They were a little over a month old on the day I visited them.
Ms. CROSIER: She looks good, no nasal discharge. Her eyes look clear.
BLOCK: The cubs are getting their daily weigh-in, plunked into a kind of measuring cup on a digital scale.
Ms. CROSIER: 2.15 kilograms. Good. She must have had a good lunch.
BLOCK: And am I crazy, or does her face look more female, more feminine?
Ms. CROSIER: I think it does, too.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. CROSIER: So yeah, she has a very dark, little, petite, feminine face, yeah.
BLOCK: These cubs were born 10 days apart at the Smithsonian's Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Virginia. And here's what's unusual: Even though they're not siblings, these baby cheetahs are being raised by the same mother. It's called cross-fostering.
Ms. CROSIER: Which actually hasn't been done very often in North America. This is only the sixth time.
BLOCK: That's cheetah biologist Adrienne Crosier. She explains that if a cheetah gives birth to a single cub, she won't produce enough milk, and the cub will die. So when the first cub was born, a male singleton, they took him away from his mother and started bottle-feeding him.
Ms. CROSIER: Really, there was not much of a choice in our minds that that was the best thing for the cub because we absolutely wanted him to be able to survive.
BLOCK: What was lucky was that another adult cheetah, nine-year-old Zazi, gave birth to her own female cub soon after. So the Smithsonian staff decided to take a chance. They'd see if Zazi could be a foster mom, raising both cubs together. It was a gamble. The mom could have rejected the cub, maybe even killed it, says lead cheetah keeper Lacey Braun. So the staff tried a few tricks.
Ms. LACEY BRAUN (Cheetah Keeper, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute): The night before we did put the cub with her, we put the cub in shavings with her smells. So we did already introduce her smells onto the new cub. So we might have tricked her a little bit.
BLOCK: Do you think that made a difference, having that scent on the cub?
Ms. BRAUN: Yeah, and we rubbed the cubs together, as well, so...
BLOCK: You rubbed the cubs together?
Ms. BRAUN: Just to get the other cub's smells on the new cub, so it's kind of like already her cub.
BLOCK: And it worked.
Ms. BRAUN: She was amazing. She took right to the new cub and just groomed it right away and accepted it willingly.
Ms. CROSIER: You know, she seemed to be just fine with having a second cub in there and was nursing them both within about an hour.
BLOCK: Why is it better to cross-foster, do you think, the way you are with these two cubs than to raise one by hand, just to bottle-feed one?
Ms. BRAUN: Cubs being mother-raised are so much easier to breed in the future than being hand-raised. A hand-raised cub just doesn't know how to communicate with the other cheetahs, basically, and is harder to breed.
BLOCK: What happens? Why do you think that is?
Ms. CROSIER: I think a lot of hand-raised cheetah cubs, when they become adults, they're still very bonded to humans. And the socialization that they have is stronger toward humans rather than other cheetahs, and they often don't show sexual interest in cheetahs of the opposite sex.
BLOCK: And breeding is the first priority. The wild cheetah population is designated as vulnerable to extinction. Over the last 100 years, the numbers have declined by almost 90 percent, from about 100,000 to 12,000, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa.
So these cheetahs in Virginia are a hedge against extinction. The more research scientists can do on cheetahs in captivity and the more genetic diversity they can build, the better equipped they are to save the wild species.
But for now, for these two young cubs, all that is far in the future. For now, it's all about small steps.
Ms. CROSIER: There he goes. He's out. Oh, gosh.
(Soundbite of laughter)
BLOCK: The cheetah cubs are living in a small shed with mom, who was put outside for our visit. Adrienne Crosier and Lacey Braun only spend a few minutes a day inside the shed, but they watch over the cubs all the time through their cheetah-cam.
And on this day, as they watch on a monitor, the male cub thrills them. He toddles up to the edge of the nest box and steps out, his first taste of independence. Zazi, the mom, follows close behind.
Ms. CROSIER: There she goes.
Ms. BRAUN: She'll pick him up and put him back in the nest box.
Ms. CROSIER: She's trying to figure out where she wants him as much as he's trying to figure out where he wants to go
Ms. BRAUN: And where he wants to go is out.
Ms. CROSIER: Oh, he's going again.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. CROSIER: Oh, he's such a stinker.
BLOCK: And Michele, I can tell you since we were out there in Front Royal, Virginia, the female cheetah cub has also made the big leap outside the nest box. We hear that both of them now are really active, running around their shed and playing with each other all the time.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Well, you know, here in the studio, I'm actually watching the cheetah-cam here on the computer, and I invite people to think about doing this at home, as well, because they are so adorable, and they're so teeny.
BLOCK: They are very teeny. They are extremely cute, hard to resist, no names, yet, though, just called Little Boy and Little Girl.
NORRIS: And remember if you want to watch this at home, go to npr.org.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Twenty-five years ago today was supposed to be a day of celebration. The United States had long ago won the space race with the Soviet Union. And by the time the space shuttle Challenger was set to launch in 1986, space missions seemed -well, almost routine. Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, was chosen to be the first teacher in space on that mission. And in the days before the launch, she was asked if she was worried.
(Soundbite of recording)
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. CHRISTA MCAULIFFE (Former Teacher): No. No, actually not - probably because reality hasn't absolutely set in yet. But I really see the shuttle program as a safe program. You know, when we watch it go up, it's just - it's a thrill. But look at what happened in the last launch. At three seconds, a computer shut down because one of the secondary systems wasn't working. I felt really good about that, especially now.
(Soundbite of laughter)
NORRIS: Now, it's important to remember that these days, you can watch live events as they happen - on your computer or your cell phone. But back in 1986, that kind of access was still novel. And so it was with great excitement that students and teachers in schools nationwide watched the Challenger launch on a special feed provided by NASA.
In Concord, New Hampshire, a pre-launch party was held at McAuliffe's school. Katherine Hogue(ph) was a student at Concord High.
Ms. KATHERINE HOGUE: We were down in the cafeteria where there was a TV, in the auditorium there was a TV, there were TVs in classrooms. People were holding balloons and crowded around televisions. It was a very exciting time.
NORRIS: Physics teacher Jay Godfrey was in the auditorium. It was packed with students.
Mr. JAY GODFREY (Teacher): You know, we're doing the countdown. Everybody was just ecstatic, yelling and screaming and - go, Christa. It was such a high point to see the thing finally lift off.
(Soundbite of broadcast)
Unidentified Announcer: Three, two, one. And lift-off. Lift-off of the 25th space shuttle mission, and it has cleared the tower.
(Soundbite of cheering)
NORRIS: For 73 seconds after the launch of the Challenger, the party went on, both in schools and at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where friends and family of the crew were watching and cheering, including both of McAuliffe's parents.
But then something happened, and there was a lot of uncertainty. In Concord, Jay Godfrey at first didn't understand what he was seeing.
Mr. GODFREY: I remember looking at the picture and seeing, it was actually the solid rocket boosters go off. I go, boy, that's kind of unusual. I don't really remember seeing that before. And I said, well, I'm sure it's OK. But then there was a teacher named Robert - was his first name - yelled, shut up! He was sitting up in the balcony. And I go, oh no.
NORRIS: Oh, no. People were starting to figure out what had happened as they were watching. The main external fuel tank ignited and then disintegrated in a giant fireball. The Challenger was torn apart, and fell 48,000 feet to sea. The crew died on impact. Again, there was still a lot of confusion. In the stands at Kennedy Space Center, some were still cheering as the rocket boosters veered wildly away from the giant plume of smoke in the sky. Then the cheers turned to screams as it dawned on people that something was seriously wrong.
Ms. HOGUE: And I remember thinking that there couldn't be anything wrong, this couldn't be happening, and running down the hall to go check with teachers and look at other TVs and somehow the disbelief, you know, that's impossible to believe.
Mr. GODFREY: Yeah, it was utter disbelief. This could not be happening to us. No way. First flight with a civilian aboard. It's not going to happen, couldn't possibly happen.
NORRIS: Eventually, it became all too clear what had happened. And the nation mourned as the tragedy was replayed over and over and over again on the news. When President Ronald Reagan addressed the nation after the tragedy, he paid special attention to the children in classrooms who had watched triumph turn to tragedy in only a few seconds.
President RONALD REAGAN: I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave. A Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
NORRIS: Watching the Challenger that day from her spot at the Kennedy Space Center was Barbara Morgan. She was the backup to Christa McAuliffe in the Teacher in Space program. She eventually joined NASA as a full-time astronaut and in 2007, made it to space on the Endeavor shuttle. I talked to Morgan earlier, and I asked her about her memories of that day.
Ms. BARBARA MORGAN (Teacher, Astronaut): That day, for me, was like everyone else in the country and around the rest of the world. It was such a sad, sad tragedy. But what I like to remember are the wonderful smiles and enthusiasm of our friends on the Challenger crew as they were heading out to the Astrovan. They were on a mission; it was a very important mission. And they were very proud to be flying in space and exploring for all of us.
NORRIS: When you were going through the training for this, filling out all that paperwork, did you consider the danger?
Ms. MORGAN: You know, what I was considering - and I think all of us were considering - were this tremendous opportunity to bring the world to our students, and to bring our students out into the world. You know, while we never expected anything like that to happen, and space flight at that time was starting to seem pretty routine, our wonderful commander, Dick Scobee, spent some time talking to Christa and me about the risks.
NORRIS: Earlier this week, we heard President Obama say something interesting in the State of the Union Address. And he said that this is this generation's Sputnik moment - referring to a period of time when America really tried to rev into high gear to compete against the Soviets after they pulled out ahead of us in the space race.
For a generation of children that are sitting in classrooms today, how do you get them excited about exploration and space travel?
Ms. MORGAN: That's a great question. And you get them excited about it by involving them. Space exploration - there are so many questions that need to be answered for us to be able to continue moving forward. And questions are a great key for education because curiosity is really, what drives learning. And if we can engage our students through their curiosity, nobody has to force it on anybody. Those students will be engaged, and they will be helping out.
NORRIS: How should people honor this anniversary?
Ms. MORGAN: You know, I would hope that we honor them by keeping the future open, by looking deep within ourselves for our curiosities. And I also hope that we'll honor it by making sure that we have a robust space program that keeps moving us all forward.
NORRIS: Barbara, thank you very much.
Ms. MORGAN: Thank you, Michele.
NORRIS: And we should remember that Christa McAuliffe was not the only one on board the Challenger 25 years ago. The six other members of the crew that day were mission specialists Judy Resnik, Ellison Onizuka and Ron McNair; payload specialist Gregory Jarvis; pilot Michael Smith; and Commander Dick Scobee.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
A mother in Akron, Ohio, was released from jail this week. She served nine days for lying in order to get her children into a better school system. The case has received national attention, and the controversy appears to be growing. The felony conviction of Kelley Williams-Bolar has stirred strong feelings over school funding, equality and the law.
Jeff St. Clair of member station WKSU reports.
JEFF ST. CLAIR: Two and a half years ago, Kelley Williams-Bolar was called to a meeting at a middle school her two daughters attended. When she arrived, she faced school administrators and a school lawyer. The meeting didn't go well, turning into a shouting match.
The Copley-Fairlawn School on the west side of Akron had hired an investigator who discovered Williams-Bolar and her daughters lived outside the district, in subsidized housing 2 miles away in Akron.
She claimed in affidavits that she and her daughters lived in Copley with her father. This month, the 40-year-old single mom found herself in court, facing felony charges of tampering with records. She was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison, but that was immediately reduced to only 10 days with time served.
Still, her reaction in the crowded Akron courtroom was heart-wrenching.
(Soundbite of crying)
Her minister, Lorenzo Green's reaction that day was more muted.
Mr. LORENZO GREEN: It's just sad. When I see the media here today, you would think it was a serial killing. It's all overwhelming.
ST. CLAIR: Williams-Bolar served nine days and is now free. Her felony conviction for falsifying records to attend a better school is a first for Ohio. She is still overwhelmed by the national attention her case is receiving and did not respond to interview requests.
But Akron City Council President Marco Sommerville has taken up her cause because, like many, he feels the punishment didn't fit the crime.
Mr. MARCO SOMMERVILLE (President, Akron City Council): The young lady was wrong. She should not have tried to take her kids to another school system, should not have falsified any public information, but the fact that she did, we feel it strange that she got charged with a felony.
ST. CLAIR: Sommerville and others across the country are asking: What would prompt someone to risk so much to send her kids to a better school? Dan Domenech of the American Association of School Administrators says the answer is simple.
Mr. DAN DOMENECH (Executive Director, American Association of School Administrators): The correlation between student achievement and zip code is 100 percent. You know, the quality of education that you receive is entirely predictable based on where you live.
ST. CLAIR: What Williams-Bolar did is not so unusual. Domenech estimates it's costing taxpayers nationwide tens of millions of dollars in districts that limit outside student enrollment.
Copley-Fairlawn Schools Superintendent Brian Poe says criminal charges were the final step after the family refused to pay the more than $30,000 tuition he says was owed the school.
Mr. BRIAN POE (Superintendent, Copley-Fairlawn School District): Our district did everything we possibly could to work through the situation and resolve the situation.
ST. CLAIR: In Ohio and a number of other states, schools are funded primarily through local property taxes, which Williams-Bolar was not paying. Bob Dyer, who lives in Copley, shares the school's frustration that she was not paying to educate her daughters there.
Mr. BOB DYER (Columnist, The Akron Beacon Journal): I pay a lot of money in property taxes, 53 percent of which goes to the schools, and I want that money to be paying for the people who live in my district.
ST. CLAIR: Conservative commentator Kyle Olson says this conviction highlights the need for changes in education.
Mr. KYLE OLSON: A lot of people are seeing this as the Rosa Parks moment for education and education reform.
ST. CLAIR: Public sentiment may largely be on her side. Prosecutors say all she needed to do was tell the truth, and that what Kelley Williams-Bolar did hurts other parents who follow the rules.
For NPR News, I'm Jeff St. Clair.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Now to Tucson, for one story behind the story of the mass shootings there. On January 8th, deputies from the sheriff's department sped to the scene outside the Safeway, with a special kind of first-aid kit in tow. Inspired by military equipment, the goal of the kit is to prevent wounded people from bleeding to death before medical help arrives.
NPR's Ted Robbins explains.
TED ROBBINS: Deputy Gilbert Caudillo was patrolling northwest Tucson that Saturday morning when he got a radio call: Multiple gunshot victims at a local Safeway store. He was one of the first to arrive. He jumped out of his car and ran across the parking lot.
Deputy GILBERT CAUDILLO (Tucson Sheriffs Department): I didn't hear anybody screaming. I didn't hear, you know, shouts for help. It was - someone said it was silent chaos, and that's a pretty - pretty accurate description.
ROBBINS: Caudillo called for every ambulance available. But in the chaos before they arrived, he had to make decisions.
Mr. CAUDILLO: Trying to assess who needed care and who was already deceased, basically triaging.
ROBBINS: Six people were already dead; 13 people were wounded. Other deputies arrived. They began CPR, and they opened a kit they carried, about the size of a fanny pack. It contained $99 worth of gear assembled by David Kleinman, the medic for the sheriff's department SWAT team. He says he got the idea after noticing how many police officers were dying from wounds they got in the line of duty.
Mr. DAVID KLEINMAN (Medic): It wasn't necessary for them to perish. Had there been tools like this, they probably would have survived.
ROBBINS: Kleinman came up with a two-hour training program called "The First Five Minutes." And he adapted an I-FAK, an infantry first aid kit, for civilian use. He laid out the five items in the kit on a table in the busy sheriff's operations room.
Mr. KLEINMAN: This is called an emergency bandage. It's based upon what was originally called the Israeli bandage.
ROBBINS: The bandage, developed by the Israeli military, looks like an Ace bandage you'd wrap around your knee, with a gauze pad and clips to tighten it. It can be used on any part of the body to cover a wound and stop bleeding. You can even wrap it around a stick, and use it as a leg splint.
Combat gauze is in the kit. It's infused with coagulant to stop bleeding. There are shears to cut away clothing, a black nylon tourniquet and an Asherman chest seal.
Mr. KLEINMAN: What it's made for is injuries to the chest that are compromising breathing.
ROBBINS: It's a bandage which fits over a gunshot or stab wound, and has a valve for fluid to escape.
Everything in the kit is designed to be used quickly. That's because people with severe wounds can die in the precious minutes before EMTs or paramedics arrive, or before it's safe for them to enter a crime scene or an accident area.
Ambulances got to the scene in Tucson in six or seven minutes, but Deputy Caudillo says it felt like forever.
Mr. CAUDILLO: After EMS arrived, I was kind of in shock because it felt like it was so long. And after hearing it was, you know, six, seven minutes, it was pretty amazing how that span of time felt so long.
Dr. KATHY HILLER (Emergency Room Physician, University Medical Center): They looked very effective. They were applied correctly. They were appropriately used for the injuries that were - that we saw. And the patients actually were doing very well with those basic medical interventions.
Dr. KATHY HILLER (Emergency Room Physician, University Medical Center): They looked very effective. They were applied correctly. They were appropriately used for the injuries that were - that we saw. And the patients actually were doing very well with those basic medical interventions.
ROBBINS: David Kleinman says he knows of only a few law-enforcement agencies in Arizona and Texas which use the same, or similar, kits. Now that they've proven their effectiveness in a life-and-death situation, that could change.
Ted Robbins, NPR News, Tucson.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This day, 25 years ago, brought a moment of reckoning for NASA. When the Challenger exploded, it was the first time the U.S. had ever lost astronauts during a flight. Now, NASA finds itself at another crossroads: Astronauts may soon be flying not on a shuttle but on private spaceships.
So, what might happen if a commercial space company had an accident on the scale of a Challenger?
NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reports.
NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE: Twenty-five years ago today, space shuttle Challenger lifted off into the Florida sky.
Mr. RICHARD COVEY: Challenger, go at throttle up.
Mr. FRANCIS RICHARD SCOBEE: Roger, go at throttle up.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Suddenly, a nightmare - a huge cloud of smoke. The path of the spaceship cut short. Ed Mango remembers that day. He was an engineer in NASA's Launch Control Center. And later, in 2003, NASA assigned him to recover what was left of space shuttle Columbia when it broke up during reentry. He and his colleagues at NASA don't need an anniversary to remind them of those dark days.
Mr. ED MANGO (Director, Constellation Space Transportation Planning Office, NASA Kennedy Space Center): Challenger and Columbia are very much part of what we think about this week, if not every week.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Mango now spends his work week planning for a future without the space shuttles. NASA will stop flying them later this year. And Mango heads the Space Transportation Planning Office at Kennedy Space Center. He says, by around 2015, it's possible that astronauts could be riding on the outer space version of rental cars. Spaceships owned, designed and built not by NASA but by private companies. Mango says his number one priority is to make sure those flights are safe.
Mr. MANGO: The responsibility for the mission is still ultimately accountable to NASA. And if the vehicle does not fly right, then we will be held accountable for what has happened.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: The agency has been preparing a list of safety standards that a private spaceship will have to meet before any NASA astronaut climbs on board. Some space industry watchers have criticized a draft of these standards as being too burdensome. Before, astronaut Ken Bowersox says, his company is just glad to finally get them.
Bowersox works for SpaceX. An unmanned test version of its capsule has already launched, orbited Earth and returned as planned. After a number of successful missions carrying cargo, people could be next. Bowersox says, just because the SpaceX rocket ship is designed to be cheap, that doesn't mean it won't be safe.
Mr. KEN BOWERSOX (Vice President, Astronaut Safety and Mission Assurance Department, SpaceX): Let's look at a Ferrari and a Honda Civic or a Toyota Yaris. They're greatly different in cost, but would you say that the little economy cars are less safe or more safe than the Ferrari?
GREENFIELDBOYCE: Still, any accident would probably result in a long investigation and spaceflights being grounded. Could a private company survive that?
Mr. BOWERSOX: A lot depends on how the private company reacts, and a lot of it depends on the root cause of the failure. But you can imagine that any company in that situation would have a lot of pressure on it.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: It's unclear how the public would feel about a major disaster with a private spaceship. John Logsdon is a space policy expert with George Washington University. He says, if an accident occurred during some of the first commercial spaceflights, it might create doubt about whether private companies can really manage the risks of human spaceflight.
Mr. JOHN LOGSDON (Space Policy Expert, George Washington University): But if it's three years into a regular service, I think it would be not exactly ho hum, but more akin to an aircraft accident than a space accident.
GREENFIELDBOYCE: After all, these private space companies wouldn't be boldly exploring a new frontier as NASA used to. They'd just be providing a kind of commuter flight to the space station.
Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Members of the House are back in their home districts for the first time since this session of Congress began. For freshmen, it's their first chance to report back and hear from constituents. Congressman Allen West is one of those freshmen. He's a Tea Party favorite from Florida.
NPR's Greg Allen went last night to his first town meeting, held in Deerfield Beach.
GREG ALLEN: It was billed as a town meeting but for the many Allen West supporters who attended, it had the feel of a victory rally.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
ALLEN: It was held at the South Florida Bible College. More than 300 people gave West a standing ovation when he arrived.
West began by holding up something that he told the audience was pretty special.
Representative ALLEN WEST (Republican, Florida): This is the electronic voting card that you see us using up there on Capitol Hill. And now, if you want, afterwards come by and see this because this does not belong to me, even though it does have my picture. It belongs to each and every one of you, the constituents of Congressional District 22.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
ALLEN: In many ways, West is unconventional. He's an African-American Republican representing a mostly white, affluent district. He became the first Republican in 14 years to join the Congressional Black Caucus.
Strong Tea Party support was a major factor in his victory in November. West defeated two-term Democrat Ron Klein in a swing district that stretches from Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach. During the campaign, his rhetoric was often heated. Last night, he took a mostly more measured tone.
For reporters and others anticipating a confrontation in Congress between the GOP leadership and Tea Party proponents, West had this to say.
Rep. WEST: We got all the media here and everything. Let me tell you guys something: Stop with this media manipulation of this group of Americans called the Tea Party.
(Soundbite of cheering and applause)
ALLEN: West talked proudly of the first bills passed by the House, including the repeal of the new health care law. He reiterated a promise to vote against raising the debt limit, unless the bill includes measures to control the growth of government; a balanced budget amendment and a cap on federal spending.
West said he was there mostly to talk to his constituents about the nation's fiscal picture and the need to make hard budget decisions. Using charts and graphs, he told this mostly over-age-50 crowd there would have to be significant cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Rep. WEST: The explosive growth of entitlement spending, we've got to get it off of auto-pilot. We really do. We've got to make some hard looks at that. There are many different things that we can do...
ALLEN: West said he endorsed many of the ideas circulated by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, such as raising the retirement age and changing Medicare's fee-for-service structure. It was a sober discussion with no applause lines and which the audience met mostly with silence.
Rep. WEST: We're not going to do anything that's going to put the American people or our seniors, or anyone's life at jeopardy. And I don't want to hear all of this fear-mongering and the use of propaganda against what you all know that we must do. It is time that we start to talk to the American people as adults, and stop talking to them like children.
ALLEN: There were some Democrats at last night's town meeting, including Donald Mello of Deerfield Beach. Mello voiced a political reality - that West and anyone looking to cut Social Security and Medicare would not find them easy targets.
Mr. DONALD MELLO: Well, I don't think so because senior citizens are probably the largest voting bloc that actually votes in this country. So I think if you are going to do that, you are going to put your office in jeopardy.
ALLEN: At last night's town meeting, West referred several times to a well-thumbed copy of President Obama's State of the Union speech, in which West had made copious notes. The audience seemed skeptical, but West said he saw in the speech places where he could work with the White House.
Rep. WEST: That's the rhetoric. We'll see what happens with the reality. But I just want to continue to bring up, he talked about illegal immigration, he talked about the individual tax code. So there is an opening for us to work, as he said, in a bipartisan fashion to get these things done.
ALLEN: West said he thought the 87 new freshmen Republicans in the House would stay true to their ideals. As for congressional veterans, West said he had a message: Either you go bold, or you go home.
Greg Allen, NPR News, Miami.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Today, Pentagon officials offered some details about how they plan to implement the end of "don't ask, don't tell." Congress repealed the ban on gays in the military late last year. The ban is still in place for now and it will stay that way until the secretary of Defense certifies that enough troops have been trained to deal with the policy change. Secretary Robert Gates said he expects that to happen sometime this year.
Joining us now from the Pentagon is NPR's Rachel Martin. And, Rachel, what is the Pentagon's plan to make this happen?
RACHEL MARTIN: Well, Michele, it's really an elaborate training program. The Pentagon says it wants each and every member of the military to go through some kind of sensitivity training that will essentially describe the policy changes that are going to take place, and what's expected of them in order to make these changes possible.
NORRIS: What do we know about the training that the service men and women are going to have to go through? When does it start and what is it going to consist of?
MARTIN: We're told that training materials are going to be finalized by next week and ready to roll out. But it's really going to be up to each service to decide how to use the training materials to best suit their own needs. But we know that they will include the usual military training tools: videos, PowerPoint slides, but also some case-specific scenarios meant to provoke conversations.
Everything from - what do you do if you're a commander and you see one of your subordinates coming out of a gay nightclub? Or what if you overhear people in your unit making inappropriate gay jokes or using gay slurs?
NORRIS: What does the military say about how a commander should handle that kind of situation?
MARTIN: Well, in terms of the gay bar scenario, the policy says it's irrelevant - where a service member spends his or her free time is really up to them. And as long as it doesn't violate the military standards of conduct - and going to a gay bar wouldn't - then it's fine.
Now, as far as those jokes are concerned, that's a larger issue and it speaks really to the command climate. The policy is clear, that disrespecting any service member isn't tolerated. And that includes references or jokes about someone's sexual identity.
Clifford Stanley talked about this today. He's the undersecretary for Personnel and Readiness, and he's in charge of figuring out to implement all of this. And he said the key to making this policy change is setting an example from the top down. Let's take a listen.
Major General CLIFFORD STANLEY (Under Secretary, Personnel and Readiness, Department of Defense): Leadership, professionalism, discipline and respect are supposed to be there now, and should be there even when repeal is effective. And so, what I'm saying is that this is about leadership. And it's not about a specific thing or changing policies that apply to this current discussion.
MARTIN: Interesting also to note, Michele, that the Pentagon has said that they're not expecting to change people's attitudes when it comes to homosexuality. They want to change people's behaviors, and that's what the training emphasis is going to be.
NORRIS: And as for changing their behavior, there are issues that will certainly surface on military property, certainly on bases. What about dealing with partners of gay troops? Did they clarify any changes to housing, or benefits, or things like that?
MARTIN: The Pentagon did address this and they have been clear that there will be no special housing for gay troops. There will also be no special benefits for gay partners. They're following the Federal Defense of Marriage Act, which explicitly does not recognize gay marriage. Although Pentagon officials do point out that there are several benefits, including life insurance, where a service member can name anyone as their beneficiary. And there's nothing saying that they couldn't name a gay partner as that beneficiary.
NORRIS: We noted that this might take place some time this year. Do you have anymore specific sense of a timeline?
MARTIN: Well, that's what Secretary Gates wants to happen. He says it's important to move with urgency. But it's really going to be a judgment call on his part. As soon as he's thinks enough troops have been trained and it's moving smoothly, then he'll certify the change. But then it takes another 60 days until the law is officially changed.
So Pentagon officials have made it clear that until that point, Don't Ask Don't Tell is still in place. And that means someone could get discharged for openly coming out as a homosexual.
NORRIS: Rachel, I've got to let you go but I've got one last, very quick question. Is some of this training happening in theater?
MARTIN: It definitely will happen in theater. Pentagon officials weren't clear about exactly when someone sitting on a base in Helmand Province will get this training. But they will get it.
NORRIS: Thank you, Rachel.
MARTIN: You're welcome.
NORRIS: That's NPR's Rachel Martin at the Pentagon.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This week, Japan faced yet another economic humiliation. Standard & Poor's, the credit rating agency, downgraded the country. The agency said it's worried about Japan's long-term ability to pay back its debt. Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money team explains why this concerns American policymakers.
ADAM DAVIDSON: If you happen to run into Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner or the chair of the Fed, Ben Bernanke, and for some reason you want to terrify them, just start talking about Japan's economy. Frankly, you should probably feel afraid when you hear about Japan's economy.
You know, it's this major world economic superpower, it got into a financial bubble, the bubble popped, and 20 years later, the country still can't seem to get itself back on track.
Here's a statistic: In 1995, Japan's economy was seven times bigger than China's. Since then, China's economy has grown a lot. It's now bigger than Japan's, and Japan's economy has actually shrunk. That just doesn't happen with major developed countries.
But as its economy was shrinking, Japan's government spent like mad. Its debt is now two times as big as its economy, its GDP. Debt twice your income is tough for a person, but for a country, it's almost unthinkable. There's only one country in the world in worse debt shape: Zimbabwe.
Those highly indebted countries you keep hearing about, the ones causing global crises like Greece and Ireland, their debt burden is way smaller than Japan's. And the future does not look so bright. Japan's population is unhealthily tilted towards older people. So they have to think about huge pension payments in the coming decades.
Now, investors are still lending lots of money to Japan at reasonable rates. The country does not seem to be on the brink of an acute fiscal emergency. But at the same time, it doesn't seem likely to break out of its long-term, chronic economic illness.
If all of this sounds a bit eerie, a premonition of where the U.S. might be headed, there's reason to be concerned and some reasons not to be so worried. The U.S. certainly has an increasing debt burden, but it's nowhere near Japan's or Greece or Ireland's or many other countries.
The U.S. economy is growing, slowly but much faster than Japan's, and while we certainly have all those retiring baby-boomers coming, we're not as tilted towards the old as Japan is, especially since we're far more open to immigration.
The standard view is that it took an awful lot of really bad decisions by Japanese government and central bank officials to get where they are today. Let's hope that Japan to the U.S. is kind of like Lindsay Lohan to the casual drinker: not an inevitability, more of a cautionary tale of where things can go when they get out of hand.
Adam Davidson, NPR News.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
(Soundbite of sirens)
(Soundbite of protest)
NORRIS: Today in Egypt, a fourth day of demonstrations and the largest ever seen in the nearly 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak's rule. There were peaceful protests, as well as scenes of chaos and violence. Hundreds are reported injured and there are unconfirmed reports of deaths. Thousands are demanding the resignation of President Mubarak.
BLOCK: Protestors remained in the streets, despite a countrywide curfew announced on state television this evening. Clashes between protestors and riot police began at midday just after Friday prayers. This was the scene in central Cairo, recorded by the BBC.
(Soundbite of protest)
Unidentified Man: (unintelligible) Down with Mubarak.
NORRIS: One of the chants - down with Mubarak. Protestors threw rocks, tried to storm government buildings and they set fire to the Cairo headquarters of Mubarak's ruling National Democratic Party. Police used tear gas, water cannons and rubber bullets on the protestors.
BLOCK: This evening, army convoys drove into the streets to some cheers from protestors. They expressed a hope that the army, unlike the police, might be on their side. Just after midnight Cairo time, President Mubarak appeared on television with his first remarks since the protests began. He said problems must be solved through dialogue, not violence. And he made this announcement, heard here through an interpreter.
President HOSNI MUBARAK (Egypt): (through translator) I have requested the government to step down today and I will designate a new government as of tomorrow, to assume new duties and to account for the priorities of the upcoming era.
BLOCK: Mubarak added that he would take steps to maintain the safety and security of Egypt and its people.
Pres. MUBARAK: (through translator) I have a firm belief and conviction that we will continue our political, economical, and social reforms for a free and democratic Egyptian society, embracing the modern principles and opening to the world.
BLOCK: That's Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, speaking through an interpreter on television. Shortly after that address, President Obama spoke briefly from the White House. He called on Egyptian authorities to refrain from violence against peaceful protesters and to stop their disruption of Internet and cell phone service. He also told protesters that they have a responsibility to express themselves peacefully.
President BARACK OBAMA: Now, going forward, this moment of volatility has to be turned into a moment of promise. The United States has a close partnership with Egypt and we've cooperated on many issues, including working together to advance a more peaceful region. But we've also been clear that there must be reform political, social, and economic reforms that meet the aspirations of the Egyptian people.
BLOCK: President Obama said he'd spoken with President Mubarak and told him that he must deliver on his promises of greater democracy and economic opportunities.
Pres. OBAMA: What's needed right now are concrete steps that advance the rights of the Egyptian people, a meaningful dialogue between the government and its citizens, and a path of political change that leads to a future of greater freedom and greater opportunity and justice for the Egyptian people.
Now, ultimately, the future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people. And I believe the Egyptian people want the same things that we all want a better life for ourselves and our children and a government that is fair and just and responsive. Put simply, the Egyptian people want a future that befits the heirs to a great and ancient civilization.
BLOCK: President Obama speaking at the White House this evening.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And for some sense of how this crisis in Egypt will play out, I'm joined by a former diplomat who knows President Mubarak well and met with him dozens of times. Daniel Kurtzer was ambassador to Egypt from 1997 to 2001. Welcome to the program.
Mr. DANIEL KURTZER (Former Ambassador to Egypt): Thank you.
BLOCK: What do you make of the statement by President Mubarak asking his government to resign while he remains as president of Egypt?
Mr. KURTZER: Well, I think it's an expected reaction from Mubarak. He is on the one hand, he is defiant. He is indicating that he has no intention to take personal responsibility, as it were, for what the demonstrators are claiming is the malfeasance of the regime.
On the other hand, he has indicated a willingness to what he called dialogue and communications, wants to talk a little bit and wants to hear. And the best way he thinks to do that is to shuffle the cabinet, maybe bring in some new faces, kick out some of the old faces and see whether or not that can keep things calm on the streets.
BLOCK: And what do you think the chance of that is?
Mr. KURTZER: I think it's a short-term pacifier. I'm not sure it's going to work. A lot will depend on whom he chooses. There are some very good reformist-minded people already in the government. And the question is not whether they come or go but rather whether some of the older hands on the security side those who have been responsible for implementing the emergency laws that are so unpopular whether they are shucked to the side and perhaps some reformers are brought into those positions.
BLOCK: I was struck by one thing President Mubarak said in that speech tonight to the nation. He said I'll always be on the side of the poor. And I wonder how that goes over among the people who are out on the streets without jobs.
Mr. KURTZER: Well, you know, he's appealing, in a sense, over the heads of the demonstrators. I think he believes and I think he really believes that the majority of Egyptians trust him and think that at least he's trying to do the best he can for them. That's a proposition no one can really test right at the moment because, you know, you don't really have good public opinion surveys. But what I think he's trying to do is appeal above the heads of this essentially urban crowd to the large majority of Egyptians who he thinks will actually come out to support him and basically say, you know that essentially I'm one of you, trust me to do the right thing. I'll make some changes and things will get better.
BLOCK: Knowing Hosni Mubarak as you do, do you think he understands the deep-seated, widespread anger from the Egyptian people that he's facing right now?
Mr. KURTZER: I think he does intellectually. But he has been a little bit shielded from this by advisors over the years. Interestingly, his son Gamal(ph), who some have, you know, touted as perhaps the next president, has traveled the country a great deal in his capacity as senior official in the party. So, at least Mubarak is hearing form his son what people out in the countryside are saying. But it's really hard to say that Mubarak himself is a populist. He has become pretty much secluded and sequestered in Cairo. And one way that he's going to have to pay attention now is in a sense listening to the voices on the street.
BLOCK: And do you see any scenario, Ambassador Kurtzer, where President Mubarak would indeed step down, where there would be regime change?
Mr. KURTZER: I don't see that under almost any circumstances. There have been riots and demonstrations in the past. I think this is a different sort. But so far, there's no indication that the two main pillars of power in Egypt, which is the army and the security services, have defied orders or have refused to stand up for the regime. And as long as that continues, I think Mubarak is secure in his leadership role.
What he's trying to find is a comfort zone where he can be a little responsive but also show determination that he's not going to buckle to the streets.
BLOCK: Okay. Ambassador Kurtzer, thanks for talking with us.
Mr. KURTZER: My pleasure.
BLOCK: That's Daniel Kurtzer. He was ambassador to Egypt from 1997 to 2001.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
For more on the unrest in Egypt and what it will mean for the U.S. and the Obama administration, we get some analysis now from our political commentators, E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Brookings Institution; and Linda Chavez, chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity and a veteran of the Reagan White House. Welcome to both of you.
Mr. E.J. DIONNE (Columnist, Washington Post): Thank you.
Ms. LINDA CHAVEZ (Chairman, Center for Equal Opportunity): Thank you.
NORRIS: Egypt is one of the United States' most important allies in the region. I want to begin by getting your assessment of the administration's handling of these events so far. It seems like the U.S. is in a bind as a long-time supporter of Hosni Mubarak, but also a very strong supporter of the right for peaceful protest. E.J.?
Mr. DIONNE: The administration is in a bind here. There are so many ways for this to go wrong for the Obama administration. On the one side, the administration has been criticized by conservatives, neoconservatives, but also by some human rights liberals for not speaking up earlier and more strongly for democracy in Egypt.
On the other side, if the administration's calls now on President Mubarak's government to exercise restraint lead to his overthrow and his replacement by a government hostile to the U.S., then President Obama is going to find himself compared with Jimmy Carter, who after all said the shah should exercise restraint. He was replaced by the Islamic government.
The best outcome for the administration, and I think for everybody else, is if this made Egypt a more democratic country whether under Mubarak or under someone else. Another possibility is that Mubarak crushes this movement, but makes concessions on the one side or ends up with this sullen, unhappy country underneath him.
NORRIS: Linda Chavez, were you among the conservatives who were pressuring the administration to make a different move here? And I'm also wondering if you think the president, having given this very important speech in Cairo, is expected at some point to stand up and speak out on this issue.
Ms. CHAVEZ: Well, I think the problem for the administration is it has this rather sketchy record when it comes to supporting human rights in pro-democratic movements.
In Iran, for example, after the farcical elections, the administration was not very outspoken, did not do a lot actually to help those who are in the pro-democratic movement. And, of course, the administration's claim was, well, if we did that, we'd be blamed. But we get blamed anyway.
So, I do think that the administration is in a very tough spot here. And it just shows how much difference 72 hours can make. You know, three days ago we were talking about the State of the Union, we're talking about the economy. But the fact is, when you're president of the United States, you may want to focus on jobs, you may want to focus on the economy.
But when you have an international crisis, and one of this potential magnitude - I mean, we're talking about the Suez Canal here. You're talking about 20,000 ships that go in and out of there and you're talking about a very, very volatile region of the world. And if Egypt falls, if the Muslim Brotherhood does step into that vacuum, it could be very, very bad news.
NORRIS: But the destiny is so closely linked to the fates of other countries -Israel, Iran, Syria. What's at stake here and how will this shape U.S. policy in the Middle East going forward?
Mr. DIONNE: Well, I mean, the honest answer for all of us sitting right here right now is we don't know because it's so hard to see how this turns out. But Egypt is a linchpin. Egypt was - made peace with Israel. Egypt has been a force for moderation, put aside the domestic policy, for moderation toward Israel on the part of Arab countries.
And, you know, there are some opportunities right now, given a moderate Palestinian leadership on the West Bank that really seems to be making some progress. Obviously, turmoil in Egypt will only make progress in that area more difficult.
NORRIS: If the U.S. decides to try to apply pressure to Hosni Mubarak to respond to the demands of some these protestors, how might they do that? Might they use some sort of economic leverage since they provide billions of dollars to the Egyptian military?
Ms. CHAVEZ: Well, that is exactly what Robert Gibbs hinted at is that there was going to be a review of financial aid to Egypt. We are a huge contributor to Egypt. I think they are the number two recipient of American foreign aid. And so, obviously, that can be a little bit of leverage that we can use to try to see democratic reforms.
But again, we have to be very careful because if the Mubarak regime does in fact collapse, we have to worry about what the Islamists who are in the region are going to do to take advantage of that situation. We've already got a problem now - Tunisia, for all of the problems in that country. Tunisia was, again, more moderate when it came to the whole Islamist issue. And there's Yemen, is also sort of teetering.
Mr. DIONNE: I think you see how complicated this is when you do compare it to the earlier democratic uprising in Iran. I disagree a little bit with Linda because I think the administration was right to worry about having the democratic movement there, in quotes, tainted by association with the United States. Nonetheless, our interests there were quite unambiguous. We're on the side of democracy and we would like the Ahmadinejad government to be replaced by a different government.
In this case, we're on the side of democracy, but we're very worried about the government that might replace Mubarak. And that's why the administration is on such tenterhooks.
NORRIS: Good to talk to both of you. Thank you very much. Have a good weekend.
Ms. CHAVEZ: Thank you.
Mr. DIONNE: Good to be with you.
NORRIS: That's E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post and Brookings Institution. And Linda Chavez, she's the chairman of the Center for Equal Opportunity, also a veteran of the Reagan White House.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris. As protesters swarm the streets of Egypt and several other Arab countries, commentator Andrei Codrescu is tempted to draw a parallel, a parallel to the fall of communism in Europe more than two decades ago. But Codrescu stops short of that.
ANDREI CODRESCU: Cell phone, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter video coming out of Egypt and Yemen are as murky and chaotic as the pictures we had coming out of Romania or Warsaw in 1989. What brings people to the streets isn't as important as what happens if they win.
In Bucharest in 1989, young people took over the state's television and looked for a moment like leaders elected spontaneously to bring an end to the dictatorship. And then the real guys showed up, the generals and the apparatchiks who had been getting ready to seize power.
The demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and wherever there is a next, are drunk with freedom and ready to die for it, but it's the freedom of being together in a raging mass, the madness of crowds, as Charles Mackay called it in 1841. And what happens when and if they succeed won't look anything like what we are seeing on the Web and on TV.
In the bipolar world of 1989, the media broadcast, dutifully, images of the visible struggle, but those images didn't add up to a neat story of a communist demise and capitalist triumph.
The scenes we are seeing in Tunis, Yemen, and Egypt in the schizophrenic teens of the millennium won't add up to a simple story of the triumph of democracy and new media over tyrants and state-controlled news, either.
In Romania before 1989, they used to say that it was a country blessed with everything: oil, gold, good soil and great weather, just like Switzerland. The only problem, Romanians weren't Swiss.
In Cairo in 2011, just like in Bucharest in 1989, it took guts to imagine a different world. In Europe, that world came eventually, and it was a lot better than the one before. Let's hope the same thing happens now.
NORRIS: Andrei Codrescu covered the revolution in Romania in 1989 for this network.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
Parts of Egypt resemble a warzone today. Tens of thousands of protesters filled the streets, not only in Cairo but other cities as well. And there were widespread clashes with police. There are reports of some deaths and hundreds of injuries. In the evening, the Egyptian army was deployed.
BLOCK: Today's protest began after Friday prayers with loud demands for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. Mubarak has yet to issue any statement. His government has blocked Internet sites and cut cell phone networks to try to keep protesters from organizing.
Earlier today, I spoke with NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson. She was on her hotel balcony in downtown Cairo, and throughout our conversation, we could hear loud noises in the background.
(Soundbite of explosions)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: This is the sound of teargas canisters. Every so often, we hear what sounds like rubber bullets, and then, there are these things that sound like percussion bombs. But that pop that you just heard, for example, is a teargas canister. And they've been firing this nonstop since maybe about 1 o'clock, 1:30 this afternoon.
I mean, I've gotten gassed several times myself today. It's just completely enveloped the center of town. But people are somehow breaking through this. It's amazing how many people are just pushing through despite the efforts here of the police.
BLOCK: And they're defying the curfew at this point. How many people would you say are in the streets from where you stand right now?
NELSON: I mean, it's very difficult. Again, how do you estimate something like this? But it definitely sounds like thousands to me because it's completely enveloping this very huge square. Again, the place they're trying to get into - and this is where the police are making what many are describing here as the last stand - is Tahrir Square.
This will be a very much a symbolic - a very strong symbolic victory if the protesters are able to take this. Or in reverse, if the government is able to keep the protesters out, but that does not seem likely anymore at this point. We already have hundreds of protesters surging through the square. You can hear them cheering now, pushing their way in. There are many, many people here despite there being so much teargas.
BLOCK: There are reports from earlier today, Soraya, of riot police who have been taking off their uniforms and badges and joining the demonstrators. Have you seen or heard about that?
NELSON: I have not seen that. I, unfortunately, have seen much sadder pictures. As we were approaching here in the earlier afternoon hours, you saw many protesters carrying other protesters that were bloodied and injured. They were - some were crying, saying that the police had taken to using live bullets. No way to verify that.
I've heard some sharper sounds that sound like they might be live fire, but again, I'm no ammunition expert. And there has been no way to do any kind of confirmation given the fact that Internet and mobile phones are down. The only thing that is working is this landline, and even that, as you hear, is sporadic.
And there has been no comment from the government, except for yesterday, the ruling party - one of the ruling party officials gave a press conference. It's important to note that the ruling party building is now on fire. The National Democratic Party headquarters is on fire in Cairo.
BLOCK: We did hear today, Soraya, from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asking for both sides to refrain from violence but also calling on the Egyptian government to respect the aspirations of the people.
NELSON: Yes. But it seems to be a little bit too little too late for the people that I've spoken to on the streets. They're very angry with Americans right now. What particularly stuck with them was a statement that Mrs. Clinton made earlier on about the Egyptian government being stable, and they feel betrayed.
People I've spoken to today keep complaining it's American teargas that's being used. Again, no way to verify that that's, in fact, the case. But they're done with it. I had people who refused to speak to me because I would identify myself as working for National Public Radio, an American radio station. They're like anybody but Americans. They're very, very angry right now. So it seems that there is some fence mending to do if, in fact, Mr. Mubarak's government falls.
BLOCK: Walk us through just a bit about who is responding on the military side. It's the Egyptian army, as well as the interior ministry, right?
NELSON: Well, actually, the Egyptian army has not been involved at all until today, and people actually would welcome that. They feel the army would be on their side. It has been police forces, state security forces, forces that answer to the interior ministry, and which many Egyptians complained had been acting with impunity under the state emergency law that's been effect for nearly three decades.
BLOCK: Soraya, you mentioned that the people thought the army would be on their side. Why would that be?
NELSON: They're thinking that once the army comes that a coup will take place. So that somehow this will end. They don't see the army as being their enemy but, in fact, as their friend. They don't see them as being on the side of Mr. Mubarak's government. So, in fact, the army as they're rolling in armored personnel carriers, they've been cheered. They have not been booed. And that is the case here as well as they start to roll into Tahrir Square.
BLOCK: Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson talking with us from Cairo.
Soraya, thanks so much.
NELSON: You're welcome.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
Now, to some other voices from the streets of Egypt.
Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid is a professor of political science at Cairo University. He hasn't joined in the protests, but he and fellow professors did sign a letter supporting the demonstrators. Today, he encountered one of those protests.
Professor MUSTAPHA KAMEL AL-SAYYID (Political Science, Cairo University): Around 1:30 this afternoon, I saw a demonstration happening, in fact, in front of my house, and the demonstrators were mostly young people, and they were calling for the fall of the regime under the slogan which they repeated many times was: change, freedom, justice, humanity.
BLOCK: What is that slogan in Arabic?
Prof. AL-SAYYID: This is the (Arabic spoken).
BLOCK: And, of course, he heard many chants for Mubarak to step down, which professor al-Sayyid says should happen if the president doesn't agree to a long list of political, social and economic reforms.
Prof. AL-SAYYID: If he does not accept these demands, I think he should step down immediately. But I think the only way for this situation to be resolved is for President Mubarak to go away. If he stays in power, I think we are going to continue to see this kind of unrest.
BLOCK: That's Cairo University professor Mustapha Kamel al-Sayyid. We also reached Ramy Raoof today. He works for a human rights group, and he was among the throngs of protesters in the streets of Cairo.
Mr. RAMY RAOOF: I joined the demonstration today in a district in Cairo (unintelligible), and it was a very huge demonstration. And the police in the beginning they did not cordon us or didn't start any violence against us. We kept marching freely for around one hour and a half. And then suddenly, the police showed up everywhere, and they started to surround us and they started to throw on us stones and gases and teargases. And they started to shoot in the air dumdum bullets to make the people more afraid.
And then, police vehicles kept rolling on the street against the demonstrators. And then, police officers in civilian dress holding their batons went against the demonstrators and started to beat all the demonstrators, wearing their civilian dress, not their official dress.
BLOCK: The police were using batons you're saying, and throwing stones and glass...
Mr. RAOOF: Yes.
BLOCK: ...at the protesters.
Mr. RAOOF: Yes.
BLOCK: Were there any injuries?
Mr. RAOOF: Yes. There are many injuries. Yes.
BLOCK: Are you afraid, Ramy, I mean, with the increased police presence, the tanks, the riot police that are out, are you afraid for your safety?
Mr. RAOOF: No.
BLOCK: Why not?
Mr. RAOOF: Why would I be afraid?
BLOCK: Well, it could turn violent. It could turn even more violent.
Mr. RAOOF: Yeah. It could turn more violent, yeah, but I'm not afraid. I mean, as long as we are saying what we want to say in the street, that's our right.
BLOCK: But you're not afraid. I mean, if there were to be a crackdown, aren't you afraid for what would happen?
Mr. RAOOF: That's the point. Every time Egyptians do any peaceful assembly, it ends up (unintelligible) by the police officers. But nowadays, there are tens of thousands of Egyptians in the streets, so we are more powerful now than any time before.
BLOCK: We are more powerful now than any time before, the words of protester Ramy Raoof in Cairo.
The protests have spread across Egypt, to Suez and to the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria. That's where we reached Souad Mekhennet, a special correspondent for The New York Times. She told us the story about one face-off between protesters and police.
Ms. SOUAD MEKHENNET (Correspondent, The New York Times): When the police basically understood that there were too many protesters, they were standing face to face, and then the protestors were shouting: This is a peaceful march, and we are one. You know, this is Egypt. We are all Egyptians. And then they started to shake hands with the police. And we saw that some protestors even gave water or other things to drink to the policemen.
BLOCK: How did the police respond?
Ms. MEKHENNET: You know, they were - actually, there was one situation where I overhead how a protestor spoke to a policeman, and they were both saying to each other, yeah, we are also - I mean, the policeman said yeah, I'm also not happy with what's going on. But, you know, my job is my job. I have to do my job.
And they were pretty speechless. It was an incredible situation, actually, to see that, those two sides who had been enemies for more than two hours, you know, this battle was going on, and then at the end, they shake hands. And you could hear from the policemen that they said, yeah, at the end of the day, we are also Egyptians. And we don't want to hurt our brothers.
For them, it seemed to have been very tough to attack young Egyptians who, at the end of the day, were just trying to protest against what they think is unjust. And many of the policemen seemed to silently agree to what these protestors actually were marching for.
BLOCK: That's Souad Mekhennet. She's reporting for The New York Times from Alexandria, Egypt.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
The Obama Administration scrambled to stay on top of today's fast-paced events in Egypt. As NPR's Scott Horsley reports, the White House is wary of pushing too far too fast against a key ally.
SCOTT HORSLEY: President Obama's been getting updates on the situation in Egypt throughout the day. His daily security briefing, which usually covers hotspots around the world, was devoted entirely to the protests and the Egyptian government's crackdown.
Later, White House deputies gathered in the Situation Room, where they heard directly from the U.S. ambassador in Cairo. Here's White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (White House Spokesman): We're monitoring a very fluid situation. We are deeply concerned about the images and the events that we see in Egypt today. The security personnel in Egypt need to refrain from violence. Protestors should refrain from violence, as well.
HORSLEY: So far, Gibbs says, President Obama has not spoken directly to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But the two governments are in regular contact.
The administration has quietly urged Mubarak in the past to address the concerns reflected in today's protests, including demands for free and fair elections and an end to decades of emergency law.
The U.S. also called on the Egyptian government to restore Internet, cell phone, and social media access that was cut off in anticipation of today's protests.
Gibbs warned that if the violent crackdown continues, the U.S. government will rethink the billion-and-a-half dollars in foreign aid it sends to Egypt each year.
Mr. GIBBS: Let's be clear: The people of Egypt are watching the government's actions. They have for quite some time, and their grievances have reached a boiling point.
HORSLEY: The administration is also cautioning American citizens to avoid unnecessary travel to Egypt and taking steps to secure the U.S. embassy there and Americans who are already in the country.
Scott Horsley, NPR News, the White House.
BLOCK: And we have an update now. At this moment, Egyptian President Hozni Mubarak is addressing the Egyptian people on state television. We'll bring you updates throughout the show on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
Today, Ford Motor Company announced its 2010 yearly earnings. The company made $6.6 billion dollars in profits. That makes it Ford's most profitable year since 1999.
Despite the good news, the numbers were not quite as rosy as many industry analysts had hoped. The company's stock actually fell today, and as NPR's Sonari Glinton reports, Ford still has a long road ahead.
SONARI GLINTON: Imagine for a moment that car companies were movies and the earnings season was the Academy Awards. The Car-Oscar ceremony would probably go something like this.
Unidentified Man: The nominees are: General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Toyota. And the envelope please? I can never get these things open. With more than $8 billion, the winner is Ford Motor Company of Dearborn, Michigan.
GLINTON: Then enter the happy CEO, Alan Mullaly.
Mr. ALAN MULLALY (Chief Executive Officer, Ford Motor Company): Oh it's fantastic.
GLINTON: That's probably how it would go, and it's sort of how it did when Ford announced its earnings today. Ford made over $8 billion before taxes and interest and about $6.6 billion after. That means Ford employees will get profit-sharing checks. And it means it's been the best year for the company in more than a decade. Again CEO Allan Mullaly speaking in an interview.
Mr. MULLALY: You think about back then and now, this is a complete transformation of Ford.
GLINTON: 1999 seems like a lifetime ago, and it was for the auto industry. It was before gas prices spiked, before the economic collapse and before the deep recession. But while the whole industry had a tough decade or so, things turned out worse for Ford's competitors.
Gary Bradshaw is a portfolio manager with Hodges Capital Management. He says Ford was able to capitalize on its competitor's misfortunes.
Mr. GARY BRADSHAW (Portfolio Manager, Hodges Capital Management): The consumer has come back in a big way. At the time that, you know, General Motors has stumped their toe by going into bankruptcy, and that's left a sour taste in the consumers mouth, and then the issues that Toyota had.
GLINTON: Bradshaw and others say Ford has been benefiting from a halo effect, scooping up customers that have fled the other automakers. They have streamlined, selling off foreign luxury brands and severely cutting dozens of vehicle brands. That reduced costs and added to the company's bottom line.
But, and there is a but, Ford still has some problems. For example, Ford needs to attract more customers overseas, especially in China, where it sold only a half million vehicles. And instead of taking the bankruptcy route, Ford went into debt, a lot of debt.
David Whiston is an investment analyst with Morning Star. He says that debt poses a problem.
Mr. DAVID WHISTON (Investment Analyst, Morning Star): Yes, their credit is less than ideal. And it's getting better, though, which is good. But it's not there yet. So they do pay a higher funding cost than, say, Toyota.
GLINTON: Ford executives say they expect to pay off the debt this year. All the U.S. car companies have debt, but Ford also has a problem that GM and Chrysler don't have: union negotiations.
Mr. GEORGE MAGLIANO (Analyst, HIS Automotive): Ford is the only company that does not have a no-strike clause.
GLINTON: George Magliano is an analyst with IHS Automotive. Because of deal cut with the government during bankruptcy, GM and Chrysler have no-strike clauses in their contracts with the United Auto Workers union. Magliano says Ford's profits could put it in a tough negotiating position.
Mr. MAGLIANO: It is paramount that they get this union contract nailed down and get it nailed down peaceably.
GLINTON: Meanwhile, the investor Gary Bradshaw say Ford faces another potential problem: higher gas prices.
Mr. BRADSHAW: And that's going to weigh heavy on the consumer's mind again. And will he be buying the new F150 trucks or the diesel trucks where, you know, they got profit margins?
GLINTON: Bradshaw and the analysts agree that Ford is on its way to health, that is if the economy doesn't get in the way.
Sonari Glinton, NPR News Detroit.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
The Obama administration's position on Egypt has been evolving quickly as the crisis has unfolded.
NPR's Michele Kelemen reports that the administration is suggesting it might cut U.S. assistance to Egypt if the crackdown on protesters continues.
MICHELE KELEMEN: Obama administration officials have carefully calibrated their comments about Egypt this week, supporting the rights of people to protest while reaffirming that Hosni Mubarak's government has been an important ally for the U.S.
But as things turned dangerous today, Secretary Clinton came out with a firmer message to Mubarak's regime: Restrain your security forces and hear out the demands of the many thousands taking to the streets.
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): These protests underscore that there are deep grievances within Egyptian society, and the Egyptian government needs to understand that violence will not make these grievances go away.
KELEMEN: But is President Mubarak finished? Secretary Clinton avoided answering that very direct question today, saying only, she's been pushing the Egyptian government to implement social and political reforms.
Secretary CLINTON: It is absolutely vital for Egypt to embrace reform, to ensure not just its long-term stability, but also the progress and prosperity that its people richly deserve.
KELEMEN: Some Egypt watchers, though, say the Obama administration is ramping up its rhetoric way too late.
Dr. STEVEN COOK (Senior Fellow, Middle Eastern Studies, Council on Foreign Relations): Talking about reform, in particular, seems hopelessly behind the curve.
KELEMEN: That's Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations, who just got back last night from Cairo. Mubarak's government, he says, has long ignored U.S. calls for reform. No matter what happens, he says, the U.S. relationship with Mubarak will have to change, so the U.S. might as well be as direct with him as possible.
Dr. COOK: And we should be able to say that this is unacceptable to us, as your patron. And we should be able to say it publicly.
KELEMEN: President Obama's comments tonight, though, were more guarded than that. He said he told President Mubarak to follow through on pledges for a better democracy and to stop trying to suppress the voices of protesters.
The Obama administration is now reviewing U.S. aid to Egypt and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says much will depend on how events unfold. He says the U.S. has a long list of concerns - from the communications blackout to the house arrest of the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed El Baradei, who returned to Egypt to join the protesters.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (Press Secretary, White House): This is an individual who is a Nobel laureate, who the president knows and has worked with on a host of nuclear security issues as the once head of the IAEA. These are the type of activities that the government has a responsibility to change.
KELEMEN: Egypt's army chief happened to be in Washington for talks as the protests unfolded, but he has now cut short his trip to return. The State Department, meantime, is urging Americans to avoid traveling to Egypt, and says U.S. citizens there should stay put until protests subside, and not try to get to the embassy which is close to Tahrir Square - a focal point for the protests.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
After a day of demonstrations against his regime, Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, went on television this evening in an attempt to quell the uprising. Here he is speaking through an interpreter.
President HOSNI MUBARAK (Egypt): (Through Translator) I call on our youth and call on each and every Egyptian citizen, man and woman, to work for the public interest of the people and to stand up for the (unintelligible) of their country not by setting ablaze or assaulting private and public property. Not by this we can achieve the aspirations of Egypt and its people.
NORRIS: Addressing the camera directly, President Mubarak said he's asked the current government to step down, and that he'll appoint a new government tomorrow. He said nothing about stepping down himself.
The flames of the protests in Egypt are being covered and perhaps fanned by media old and new. Organizers found supporters and planned protests through Facebook, Twitter and text messaging, at least until Internet and cellular communications were shut down earlier today.
News networks, in particular Al Jazeera, are bringing massive attention to the clashes and demonstrations of solidarity in Cairo, Suez and Alexandria.
To examine how new forms of communication are influencing Egypt's upheaval, we're joined now by Adel Iskandar. He's a media scholar and lecturer at Georgetown University.
Thank you so much for coming in.
Professor ADEL ISKANDAR (Media and Communications Lecturer, Georgetown University): Thank you for having me.
NORRIS: First, is this uprising brought on by changes in communication? Would this kind of thing even been possible 10 years ago?
Prof. ISKANDAR: I think it's impossible to really assess that. I mean, we have a really perfect storm in many ways. I mean, we have a configuration of a public that is incredibly distraught and very angry and has been building up with this frustration for quite some time -mixed with an ability to communicate in a manner that they couldn't before.
The new media has really infiltrated Egyptian society in a very significant way, that over 20 million Egyptian Internet users - and many of them are on Facebook. So now they have another realm whereby they can resort to information. They can distribute the material. They can mobilize. They can move around. So it's created a whole new space for them to communicate, one that is not afforded to them using the traditional national press.
NORRIS: And as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted, this is a country that's experienced a youth bubble - a large portion of the population, very young.
Prof. ISKANDAR: Absolutely. A very, very large youth bubble that is incredibly disenchanted and disenfranchised. These are youth that have very little prospects, very few aspirations that are met with the current conditions in the country. And they refuse to accept anything less than absolute change.
NORRIS: What role has Al Jazeera played in this?
Prof. ISKANDAR: Al Jazeera's role - I mean, there was a lot of criticism of Al Jazeera over the last couple of days or so for failing to report the story on Egypt. They happened to have missed the early days of the protest on Tuesday, because they were too busy covering the Palestine papers. But they were very, very quick to rectify this today, situating, you know, cameras and reporters all over the country from Suez to Alexandria to Hala to Cairo, even in the most strategic locations.
So they've had literally unfettered access to some of the fascinating aerial showcases that we've witnessed. I mean, this is a real revolution literally being televised by Al Jazeera. So it's a major scoop.
NORRIS: Now, you mentioned this is a perfect storm. There had been anti-Mubarak Facebook agitators before. Why was this the right moment? Why did the storm come to a head right now?
Prof. ISKANDAR: I think it's a combination of different factors and variables, one of which is watching the Tunisian regime literally fall within a matter of weeks. I mean, this is something unimaginable and totally impractical. And it's sort of like a film reel literally unfolding in front of the Egyptians' eyes.
I mean, how do you see an Egyptian dictatorial, authoritarian, tyrannical leader all of a sudden board a plane and leave the country and then be called for or being issued an international arrest warrant?
This is something unfathomable.
NORRIS: You mean Tunisia?
Prof. ISKANDAR: Tunisia, yes. Absolutely. So for the Egyptians to see that, I mean, all of a sudden, it's a bright light at the end of the tunnel. And they'd like to see their regime follow suit.
NORRIS: What happens now with Twitter and Facebook virtually shut down?
Prof. ISKANDAR: Well, right now, Egypt is in a complete media blackout. I mean, Egypt is worse than North Korea. It's a drifting island in the middle of nowhere, where there's very little information coming out of Egypt, very little information going into Egypt, and people cannot communicate with another using cell phones. So really, this is a major question.
The point here is that we are starting to witness the Egyptian Internet generation all of a sudden letting go of their gadgets, putting down their Twitter, putting down their Facebook and taking this revolution to the street, which is something that we are usually skeptical about.
NORRIS: So turning off Twitter might have sent more people into the streets?
Prof. ISKANDAR: Sent more people into the street, so it may have actually backfired. So the regime ended up really hurting themselves by resorting to this.
NORRIS: Thank you so much for coming in.
Prof. ISKANDAR: Thank you for having me.
NORRIS: That was Adel Iskandar. He's a media scholar and lecturer at Georgetown University.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
There's a debate raging on the campus of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. That's a public, historically black college name for the slain civil rights leader. The college is trying to evict an academic center run by former prisoners. And as Joel Rose reports, the debate is part of a wider split between administrators and the college community.
JOEL ROSE: Medgar Evers has led the fight for civil rights in Mississippi.
(Soundbite of Medgar Evers' speech)
Mr. MEDGAR EVERS (Civil Rights Activist): All we want you to do is keep going with this fight for freedom. And as we stick together here...
ROSE: His assassination in 1963 inspired songs and demonstrations. Seven years later, educators and community leaders in Brooklyn named a new college in his honor.
Ms. BRENDA GREENE (Professor of English and Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature, Medgar Evers College): Our mission is dedicated to upholding the work that he did and the activism surrounding that.
ROSE: Brenda Greene has taught English at Medgar Evers College for 30 years. Today, the school serves 7,000 commuter students, including many who are not traditional undergraduates. Greene describes the college as a communiversity, with an extra emphasis on the community part.
Ms. GREENE: It's a university. It's a college with communiversity. You can't separate both parts.
ROSE: Yet that's exactly what some community members accuse the school's president and provost of doing since they came to power in 2009. The new administration has pushed for a lot of changes, none more controversial than the decision to evict a criminal justice center run by the formerly incarcerated.
Dr. DIVINE PRYOR (Deputy Executive Director, Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions): This is not just a purely academic institution, but it's also a brain thrust.
ROSE: Divine Pryor is the co-founder of the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, which has been based at Medgar Evers College since 2004. The center describes itself as an advocate for former prisoners, both on campus and in policy debates about the nation's criminal justice system. But the new administration was not impressed. Last month, Medgar Evers College provost Howard Johnson moved to evict the center.
Dr. HOWARD JOHNSON (Provost, Medgar Evers College): My goal, clearly, as chief academic officer is to make sure that we can have the highest academic standards for our students, and I didn't think they reached the level of the rigor that I would be looking for for an academic center.
ROSE: College officials point out that none of the center's staff are on the faculty at Medgar Evers College. They've also raised questions about the credentials of co-founder Divine Pryor, who got his Ph.D. from an unaccredited distance learning company. But Divine Pryor defends his degree. He says it's college administrators who are being dishonest.
Dr. PRYOR: This is about an administration who does not support a progressive, a social and criminal justice agenda. They have concerns about the criminal element being on campus. These were the actual words that was used by the provost.
ROSE: Medgar Evers College officials say the formerly incarcerated are still welcome on campus, and just to be sure, they launched a new partnership this month with the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office to provide educational support for former prisoners. Center for NuLeadership is fighting its eviction in court, but there are those on the faculty of Medgar Evers who would not be sad to see it go.
Dr. NANCY LESTER (Chairperson, Education Department, Medgar Evers College): To tell you the truth, I never ever heard of the Center for NuLeadership until all this broke out. And I've been here for 13 years, so that says something.
ROSE: Nancy Lester directs the Education Department at Medgar Evers College. She says social justice is an important part of the school's mission but so is good old-fashioned teaching.
Dr. LESTER: This is a college. It's an academic institution. It needs to have everything be part of that. I don't see how anything that's been done by the new administration goes against this mission.
ROSE: Now, the administration will have to make that case in court. A hearing on the Center for NuLeadership is set for next month.
Joel Rose, NPR News, New York.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
Across the country, state and local governments have had to make tough decisions in order to bridge budget gaps. In Kentucky, one such decision phased out family and juvenile drug court.
As Brenna Angel of member station WUKY reports, cutting the programs may save money in Kentucky now but will cost more in the future.
BRENNA ANGEL: Christy Hanley(ph) was 16 years old when she started using drugs. She eventually got hooked on crack cocaine. Ten years and three kids later, Hanley is finally clean and realizes the magnitude of being a parent to three little girls.
Ms. CHRISTY HANLEY: This is the beginning: becoming a mom, growing up, dealing with life without being high and messed up and no responsibility whatsoever.
ANGEL: Hanley shared her story at the December graduation ceremony for the family and juvenile drug court programs of Fayette County. Due to budget cuts, these programs are now abolished.
Drug courts are intensive intervention and substance abuse treatment programs. The parents in family drug court are addicts whose kids have been removed from the home by social workers. The juvenile program is for teens who spend more time getting drunk or high than going to school.
Judge Lucinda Masterton headed up the family and juvenile drug courts in Fayette County. She met with program participants each Thursday.
Judge LUCINDA MASTERTON: In the regular system, it's all about blame. It's all about you, drug addict you, finger-pointing. That's not what drug court is about. Drug court is about healing. And healing these families.
Mr. DOUG MARLOWE (Director of Law and Ethics Research, National Association of Drug Court Professionals): When all said and done, what's different about drug courts is you get better compliance. You get people - the kids actually go and stay in treatment long enough for the effects to be felt.
ANGEL: That's Doug Marlowe with the National Association of Drug Court Professionals. He says there is a growing body of research on the effectiveness of family and juvenile drug courts, including a 2007 study funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
A review of family drug courts in four counties - two in California, one in Nevada and one in New York - found reductions in parental drug abuse, higher rates of parents completing treatment effectively and higher rates of family reunification.
Mr. MARLOWE: You should expect treatment completion to be the rare exception, unless you have that court monitoring.
ANGEL: Last year, Kentucky's judicial branch faced a budget deficit of nearly $7 million - more than a hundred court system positions were eliminated, and family and juvenile drug courts were phased out as of this month.
Kentucky's adult criminal drug court remains active. There's also evidence that family and juvenile drug courts save money, although no long-term comparison study has been done in Kentucky.
Judge Masterton already has her proof that drug courts work. She looks to people like Christy Hanley or the dozens of other people Masterton hugged and cried with on drug court graduation day.
Judge MASTERTON: That woman's life was saved because of drug court. Now, what's that worth to the state of Kentucky? What's that worth to the United States?
ANGEL: And Kentucky is not alone. In recent weeks, Montana and South Dakota have begun to consider cuts to their drug court programs as a way to shore up budget problems.
That was the situation for the city of Denver in 2002. Officials there eventually brought drug courts back in 2007, and researcher Doug Marlowe now says Denver's program is actually bigger than ever.
For NPR News, I'm Brenna Angel in Lexington, Kentucky.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
One of the clearest and quite possibly best descriptions of commodity trading can be found in the film "Trading Places." In it, Eddie Murphy plays a homeless street hustler named Billy Ray Valentine. He's brought in to work for a stuffy Philadelphia commodities firm named Duke and Duke. In this scene, Valentine is brought into a conference room, where what appears to be a breakfast spread is laid out on a table.
(Soundbite of movie, "Trading Places")
Mr. EDDIE MURPHY (Actor): (as Billy Valentine) No thanks, guys. I already had breakfast this morning.
Mr. DON AMECHE (Actor): (as Mortimer Duke) This is not a meal, Valentine. We are here to try to explain to you what it is we do here.
Mr. RALPH BELLAMY (Actor): (as Randolph Duke) We are commodities brokers, William. Commodities are agricultural products, like coffee that you had for breakfast; wheat, which is used to make bread; pork bellies, which is used to make bacon, which you might find in a bacon and lettuce and tomato sandwich. And then there are other commodities like frozen orange juice and gold - though of course, gold doesn't grow on trees like oranges.
RAZ: It's no coincidence that this is one of Emily Lambert's favorite films. She covers the Chicago commodities markets for Forbes magazine, and she's just written a new history of how those markets came about. It's called "The Futures." And in it, Emily Lambert explains why it all started in the Windy City.
Ms. EMILY LAMBERT (Author, "The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator and the Origins of the World's Biggest Markets"): Chicago's weather is horrible, especially in the wintertime. If you've been - I'm sure you know - there are all kinds of things that could be blamed on it, and one of them is futures contracts, because what people needed to do at that time, especially in the grain business, was they grew grain. And then they needed to get it to Chicago to sell. And they did that by traveling on the river.
And then the river would freeze up and they couldn't get their grain to Chicago, and there was a delay. And during that delay, there was a risk that the price of grain was going to fall. So the first reason is the weather. And the second reason is that Chicago, at that time, was a boom and bust kind of town. It was growing like mad. Basically, there were a lot of people in the city who were looking for opportunities, and looking to make their fortunes, and looking to take risks.
RAZ: This was a time where you sort of had the emergence of the pit, right? Now, I think a lot of people would - and forgive me for this, because I'm jumping ahead decades, and I'm jumping into fiction. But I think a lot of people think of "Trading Places," right, the film that takes place in these exchanges, where you've got these guys in, is it green jackets or yellow jackets - I can't remember - shouting all around and in the pit.
(Soundbite of movie, "Trading Places")
(Soundbite of people yelling)
RAZ: And describe what happens inside the pit.
Ms. LAMBERT: Your description is right on. The color of the jacket actually depends on the exchange. The pit is an octagonal area where there are raised steps. So it was crammed with men, and they looked at each other -and that's where they made deals. There were people...
RAZ: This is before computers came around, right?
Ms. LAMBERT: This is before computers came around. And the pits do still exist, although they are not as full, by any means, as they once were.
RAZ: You describe the way a person would get a job at one of these exchanges back in the mid-20th century, even into the '80s - a system where you were vouched for by somebody else. How did that work?
Ms. LAMBERT: So to be a trader, you had to be a member. And in order to be a member, you had to have other members vouch for you. It was very much like a country club.
RAZ: It was a club. Yeah.
Ms. LAMBERT: Yeah. And there was very much a progression of how somebody learned the trading business. You might start off as a runner - taking slips of paper from traders who were making deals in the pits, in the frenzy of the trading atmosphere, and running it to the back office. And then you might graduate to working on the phone, taking orders from people calling in. And then you might become a broker who was in the pit, or a trader trading for yourself in the pit. And then, you might vouch for somebody else and help them get their membership.
RAZ: You describe so brilliantly the differences in culture that sort of began to emerge between the people who worked at the Chicago Board of Trade and those who worked at the Merc. And those differences still exist to this day, but I want to ask you about the culture of these two places, 'cause there's a line in your book that stands out. It says: If your first name was Murray, you went to work for the Merc. But if your last name was Murray, you went to work for the Chicago Board of Trade. Can you explain what that means?
Ms. LAMBERT: Yes. The Chicago Board of Trade was identified most closely with the Southside Irish community of Chicago. And the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a few blocks away, was predominantly Jewish. And the characters of the places, without a doubt, were - there was the Irish exchange, and there was the Jewish exchange.
RAZ: Was there a sense among people who worked in one exchange or the other that this was the better exchange? Did the people who worked in either exchange think that about their own exchange?
Ms. LAMBERT: Oh, what a funny question. Yes, they very much thought that. There was a tremendous rivalry between these exchanges. And the Chicago Board of Trade, for a very long time, was the dominant exchange. It was the futures market. And the Chicago Merc was the scrappy, younger, annoying sister to the Chicago Board of Trade.
RAZ: There was a time when the futures market was banned in onions. This happened in the mid-'50s, and it involved a man named Vincent Kosuga. Tell me the story about that.
Ms. LAMBERT: He was around in the 1950s, when onion futures were traded at the Chicago Merc. And I would hear things about Vince Kosuga like, Vince Kosuga would show up on the floor and bring his gun.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Ms. LAMBERT: And he liked to - he flew planes and flew one into the ground, and then walked out of the hospital like nothing had happened. All these really outlandish...
RAZ: This guy was kind of legendary.
Ms. LAMBERT: ...tales. Yes. And frankly, I didn't want to put some of these in the book because I wasn't sure if they were true or not. And then I met his nephew, who is a trader, who told me that oh, absolutely; they're all true. And in fact, he had more of them. But this was Vince Kosuga. Vince Kosuga was a New Yorker, a farmer. He grew onions, among other things, and he started trading onion futures at the Chicago Merc.
And he and his broker artificially drove up the price many times - not just them, but they got caught for it. And Congress banned onion futures, and it became the first futures contract ever to be banned. And in fact, the definition of a commodity, until recently, was anything but onions.
RAZ: Emily Lambert, in the book, you say the futures business was quickly corrupted. How would you describe the state of it today?
Ms. LAMBERT: Futures markets were quickly corrupted at the beginning. But over the next couple of decades, they became regulated markets. And the markets thereafter worked reasonably well. But now, there are also related derivatives markets, and those derivatives markets were, one might say, like the futures markets in Chicago in the 1800s.
So what's happening now is that it's almost like we're living back in Chicago in the 1800s, and we're hammering out the kinks of the market so that the markets will continue to function.
RAZ: That's Emily Lambert. She's author of the new book "The Futures: The Rise of the Speculator, and the Origins of the World's Biggest Markets." She's also a senior writer at Forbes magazine.
Emily, thank you.
Ms. LAMBERT: Thank you.
(Soundbite of song, "Not Great Men")
GUY RAZ, host:
The British band Gang of Four gave expression to a tumultuous period in Great Britain, a time in the late '70s and early '80s when high unemployment and the unraveling of the welfare state would usher in the rise of Margaret Thatcher and her free market revolution.
(Soundbite of song, "Not Great Men")
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) It's not made by great men. It's not made by great men. It's not made by great men. It's not made by great men.
RAZ: Punk rock, glam rock, they were on the way out, and political rock and roll was on the way in. Gang of Four never became a huge commercial success, but many bands today consider the group one of the most influential rock acts. More than three decades since they first burst onto the scene, Gang of Four, led by front man Jon King, is back with a record that sounds as urgent and fresh as ever.
(Soundbite of music )
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) (Unintelligible). She said he's beautiful and (unintelligible)...
RAZ: And Jon King is in our studios in London. Welcome to the program.
Mr. JON KING (Vocalist, Gang of Four): Hi, there.
RAZ: What can I say? Welcome back. I mean, this is your first studio record in 16 years. And wow - I mean, there is no mistaking, right off the bat with this first track, this is a Gang of Four album. Can you tell me what this record is about?
Mr. KING: When Andy and I started writing the songs that ended up on the...
RAZ: This is Andy Gill, your guitarist.
Mr. KING: Andy Gill, yeah. We had, a few years ago, been enticed back into playing some of the old classics, and we toured those songs for a while. And it was almost inevitable that we would start kicking around new ideas because I'm like most musicians - I get bored quite quickly.
RAZ: So you were kind of looking to kind of update your classic sound from the late '70s and early '80s.
Mr. KING: Well, I wouldn't say update it so much. It's just that that's the sound that we have developed for ourselves. And I think once you've got something which you think is yours and that you own, you're so naturally, I suppose, likely to go into those same territories.
(Soundbite of song, "You'll Never Pay for the Farm")
RAZ: Jon King, your music has always been lauded for its sharp social commentary. And there's some of that on this record - a lot of that on this record - and particularly in the song "You'll Never Pay for the Farm."
(Soundbite of song, "You'll Never Pay for the Farm")
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) You'll never pay for the farm. Someone should break the alarm. I think you're losing your charm. You cannot do all the harm...
Mr. KING: "You'll Never Pay for the Farm" was the first track that we'd written. This is about two years old, this song. There had been the catastrophic collapse in the financial world, caused by these gambling criminals who've made gigantic profits from other people's misery and expected us all to fund their gambling. And this is one of those songs where you've got an element of reverse engineering about it - because the line "you'll never pay for the farm" was something I thought was interesting.
And soldiers in combat since the Second World War have often used the phrase, when someone got killed: He bought the farm. And what we all struggle to do as we go along with our lives is to pay for the farm. You know, it's one of those phrases, you know, that you - once you pay for the farm, you can then pay for your other luxuries, or whatever.
And of course, the irony since the collapse of finance is that we're all -spend the whole time on this drudging treadmill to pay for the farm, but any time you'll get to pay for the farm is when you've bought the farm.
(Soundbite of song, "You'll Never Pay for the Farm")
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) You can't regret what you get. You can't get back what you bet. You can't divorce from your faith. You're lying drunk and awake...
RAZ: I'm speaking with Jon King. He's one of the founding members of the band Gang of Four. Their new record is called "Content."
Jon King, can I ask you about Gang of Four lyrics going back, going way back?
Mr. KING: Yup.
RAZ: So many of your lyrics have been parsed over for years. I mean, there's the track "Return the Gift." You sing:
(Soundbite of song, "Return the Gift")
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) Please send me evenings and weekends.
RAZ: There's a line from the song "Anthrax."
(Soundbite of song, "Anthrax")
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) And I feel like a beetle on its back. And there's no way for me to get up.
RAZ: And on "Natural's Not in It," you sang...
(Soundbite of song, "Natural's Not in It")
GANG OF FOUR: (Singing) The problem of leisure, what to do for pleasure.
RAZ: These lines mean different things to different people. And when you read people who write about Gang of Four, and about your music as a reaction to Thatcherism(ph) - or sort of the early '80s Britain, with its high unemployment and the unraveling of the unions - does that make sense to you? Do you think yeah, that's exactly what we were trying to capture?
Mr. KING: Well, I'm not sure. I mean, the things that I was interested in - I remember when I was 15, I got incredibly excited when I found some grubby, old book in a secondhand bookshop, about the revolution in Paris in 1968. There was a picture, which I still cherish - it was a photograph of, I think, for some kind of perfume, and a very glamorous-looking woman on this poster. And someone had written on it in French: I know I am exploiting you, but I'm not doing it on purpose.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. KING: I got terribly excited by the fact, and using this as a situation that's described as derive concept, where you can change the meaning of things by the label. And that predated Thatcher's arrival by a few years. And when I was at university, the things that I was very interested in was this approach. And I've wondered how one could play around with some of these sorts of ideas in music.
That said, there is no better time to be a musician - when you have a reactionary and oppressive government who are trying to grind the faces of the poor and the underprivileged into the dirt, like we have at the moment in our country.
RAZ: A lot of bands, as you know, have pointed to Gang of Four as a major influence - REM, Nirvana, the Killers. And I want to play a sample of some of the bands that say that they have been inspired by your sound. Take a listen to this.
(Soundbites of songs from various artists)
RAZ: And that last band is Bloc Party. We heard from Franz Ferdinand, the Futureheads, and a few other bands. Pretty amazing, when you hear that. What do you think when you hear a whole bunch of modern bands sounding a lot like Gang of Four from 1979?
Mr. KING: I think it's a great privilege to have somehow or other inspired other musicians to make great music. I think, you know - pompously comparing ourselves to Led Zeppelin. But I mean, Led Zeppelin probably feel the same - that the infinitely varied use of the drum intro to "Black Dog" by every hip-hop band in history. It must be quite fun to think that you - there was something there that was so vibrant, and in itself, that it was worth other musicians quoting. And that's a tremendous compliment.
RAZ: When you play shows today, when Gang of Four plays shows today, a huge part of your fan base is made up of people who weren't even born when your first record was released, in 1978. What do you make of that?
Mr. KING: It's marvelous, really. When - five years ago - I was enticed into playing again, the first show that we did, which was at (unintelligible), which sold out quite quickly, went down there on the London Underground with my 15-year-old daughter, who was coming along to the show - who had never seen one of our shows, of course.
And we got off at our bit of the Underground, and of the next two compartments of the train - emptied out, and it was, I don't know, 150 kids all in her year from her school, who came to see me play. And they were all amazed that her dad was this character. And I was very entertained by that. And I think it's because we are an oppositional band. I think people are sick of the commercial bands, the karaoke, actually - see on "American Idol" and "X Factor."
And I've always had the great luxury of never being commercially successful, so we could do what we like.
RAZ: That's Jon King. He's the front man for the legendary band Gang of Four. Their new album is called "Content." If you'd like to hear a few tracks, they're at our website, npr.org.
Jon King, thank you so much.
Mr. KING: Thank you very much. Bye.
GUY RAZ, host:
From NPR News, this is weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of siren)
RAZ: Sounds from the streets and neighborhoods in Cairo this evening, the city - and a country - that appears on the verge of revolution. Earlier in the day, the embattled president, Hosni Mubarak, appointed a new vice president. His name is Omar Suleiman, and he heads Egypt's powerful intelligence services. Now it's not clear whether that move will be enough to keep Mubarak in power. The public, for now, seems to be demanding change.
Here's Mohamed ElBaradei, a former U.N. official and now opposition figure in Egypt, speaking to the BBC.
Mr. MOHAMED ELBARADEI (Former Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency): I don't think he can succeed, you know, what I hear today. You know, that people will go back to the streets. They will go back even in larger number, probably, in the next few days now that the police has been, you know, using violence against them.
RAZ: The uprising in Egypt, that's our cover story this hour. In a moment, a report from our correspondent in Cairo. And later, what next if Mubarak loses his grip on power?
First, though, to NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson on a quieter protest. You can call it the uprising of the civilian peacekeeper.
(Soundbite of protest)
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: The battle for democracy is still under way in Tahrir Square, but for these young men, the weapon of choice was a broom.
(Soundbite of sweeping)
NELSON: They, like many here, are unhappy with the Egypt the world has seen in recent days. Fighting for political and economic reform is important, they say, but so is doing it with dignity. With quiet determination, they are trying to restore that dignity by sweeping away charred metal, rocks and bullet fragments that litter the streets and sidewalks.
Nearby, Egyptian army lieutenant Amin al Masry collects garbage from the square, which he stuffs into black, plastic bags. The 24-year-old engineer says he finds the process calming, like lighting a candle in the darkness.
Lieutenant AMIN AL MASRY: I was very upset to see this chaos, this situation. I'm angry. I'm not with the mobs because it became chaotic and without aim or purpose.
NELSON: He initially came to make sure the Egyptian National Museum and its antiquities weren't being vandalized. But al Masry says when he saw another Egyptian collecting garbage, he felt compelled to join him. So did more than a dozen others. By early afternoon, they'd collected some 300 bags' worth of trash.
Lt. AL MASRY: The aim is not just cleaning the street, but the aim is to give a message of hope.
NELSON: That's what many people who are in the square seek. They say they need something more than slogans. They want to take back their streets. Young men have formed ad hoc neighborhood watch groups across Cairo. They brandish sticks to stop vandals and looters who've been breaking into stores and homes.
Other young men, like Hosni Imam, direct traffic now that the police have fled. He wears an Egyptian flag tied like a bandana around his neck.
Mr. HOSNI IMAM: (Foreign language spoken)
NELSON: He says he wears this because he's proud to be Egyptian. He calls himself a patriot protecting his country. He loves that Egyptians have joined to demand their rights.
Mr. IMAM: (Through translator) My head is raised up high for the first time. Now I can truly say I breathe the air of my country.
NELSON: But his smile fades when he talks about the looters and vandals who've defaced property. That includes the Egyptian Museum, says tour guide Walid Afify. But he blames the government, rather than unruly protesters. He accuses officials of allowing the country to descend into chaos to justify using violence to suppress the protests.
Afify points to the high-rise that was the ruling party's headquarters. It is burning out of control, and appears in danger of collapsing. He says not a single fire engine has come to try and put out the flames.
Mr. WALID AFIFY: I was afraid because I saw the smoke coming out of the burning building, and it's very close to the Egyptian Museum. So the fire is very close by. And I wonder why the government doesn't put the fire out. And we don't have a real government to show some strength in the country in any respect.
NELSON: He says letting the country go, as President Mubarak appears to be doing, only ensures that his legacy will be that of a tyrant.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Cairo.
GUY RAZ, host:
Tim Kaldas, an Egyptian-American photographer, has been moving about the neighborhoods around Cairo today. We spoke with him just a short time ago.
Mr. TIM KALDAS (Photographer): The situation basically is very different from what we saw yesterday. Yesterday, we saw clashes with the police (unintelligible) tear gas, rubber bullets and batons come out. Whereas today, the military is taking control of the streets. The police have withdrawn officially.
RAZ: Tim, give me a sense of how people are responding to the army. I mean, is there a sense that the army is kind of a neutral arbiter here or is there a sense that the army could, at any moment, turn their guns on the protesters?
Mr. KALDAS: I think right now, people are still trying to gauge where the military stands. Because I was standing in front of the presidential palace earlier today to see what was going on there, and one old man with his wife was trying to walk by, and he was asking if it was OK. And the officer said no problem, and he extended his hand. And the elderly gentleman thought that he wanted his ID card, because that's what the police generally do. They put out their hand to ask people for ID - at random moments, for no particular reason. And so he started to go for his ID and the officer said: No, no, no, I'm just greeting you. I'm just saying hi.
RAZ: Mm-hmm.
Mr. KALDAS: And it's a very different dynamic that you're witnessing right now.
RAZ: When you walk around the city, are people in cafes and restaurants, are they watching Al Jazeera? Are they able to see images in other parts of the city?
Mr. KALDAS: Oh, absolutely. Al Jazeera has been on so many TV screens throughout the city. Even in the middle of the clashes yesterday, you know, we'd be there, there'd be tear gas thrown upon us. We'd have to recover somewhere from that. We, at times, would be led into random stores that would open their doors quickly to let us in, and then close them again to protect us from the clashes.
And on the screen would be Al Jazeera, and they'd be watching live the protest in various parts of the city, following what's going on - and really excited.
RAZ: What has struck you the most in the last day or so, something you've seen that you could not have imagined seeing in Egypt?
Mr. KALDAS: The thing that struck me perhaps the most - are just watching complete shedding of the political apathy that so many of us have observed - or thought we were observing in Cairo and Egypt for so long. I mean, for so long, I've had conversations with people who said, there's no way to do anything about it. We wish that this regime would go away. But I don't know what to do; what are we to do?
There's always the sense that, I am powerless as an individual. That sense is gone. They have decided that the mechanisms through which the police state were administered have to be destroyed and that they will take it upon themselves to do so.
RAZ: That's Tim Kaldas. He's an Egyptian-American photographer who's been moving around the city of Cairo today.
Tim, thank you.
Mr. KALDAS: Thank you. My pleasure.
GUY RAZ, host:
And joining me here in the studio is Samer Shehata. He's a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University. Thanks for coming in.
Professor SAMER SHEHATA (Arab Politics, Georgetown University): You're very welcome.
RAZ: First to the news that President Mubarak has appointed a vice president, the first time in 30 years. He is Omar Suleiman, the head of the intelligences services. Also, Ahmad Shafiq, the head of the air force, will become the new - or is the new prime minister. Will either of those appointments have much of an impact? Will they satisfy the public?
Prof. SHEHATA: I don't think so. This is another last-ditch attempt by the Mubarak regime to survive this. But the calls of the protesters have been for the ouster of the Mubarak regime; for Mubarak to get on a plane and join his friend Ben Ali in Saudi Arabia. Now, this was a shrewd...
RAZ: The former president of Tunisia, of course.
Prof. SHEHATA: Yes, the former president of Tunisia - in Saudi Arabia, where he is now in exile. But it was a shrewd move because Omar Suleiman is a known figure. He is a respected figure. He has a history in the Egyptian military, and he has some popularity in standing.
And in fact, some time ago - before this crisis, of course - his name had been mentioned by many people as a potential successor to Mubarak. So he's much more popular than Mubarak and has some legitimacy. But in the present situation, I don't think that that's going to be enough. People want more than simply a change of faces; they want a change of regime.
RAZ: Samer Shehata, let's turn to possible scenarios. What happens if President Mubarak either steps down or even has to flee the country? Who governs Egypt at that point? Is there a formal process?
Prof. SHEHATA: Yes, there is. If there is a vice president - and a legitimate vice president; and you know, Mr. Suleiman's position is questionable - then the vice president would take over the affairs of state.
However, if there was no vice president - as there has been for the last 29 years, under Mr. Mubarak's term - technically, according to the constitution, the speaker of parliament, a gentleman named Fathi Sorour, would be the interim president for a period of 60 days. After which, there would be presidential elections. And the constitution also stipulates that the interim president does not have the right to be a candidate...
RAZ: A candidate.
Prof. SHEHATA: ...in those elections. So this opens up all kinds of possibilities. I think in theory, that is a very nice transition.
Unfortunately, the constitution, over the last couple of years, has been amended at the whim of the ruling party, and tailored to meet their needs in the sense that presidential candidates can't come forward. There are all kinds of restrictions that limit who can become a presidential candidate. And that's why Mohamed ElBaradei, for example, is excluded. So that article of the constitution, Article 76, would also have to be amended in order to have genuinely free and fair elections after 60 days.
RAZ: So who could potentially fill the vacuum? I mean, we know that the only credible opposition in Egypt has been the Muslim Brotherhood. Mubarak, of course, has tried to suppress that movement. You mentioned Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. He is trying to raise his profile as a possible opposition leader. What do you imagine a post-Mubarak government could look like?
Prof. SHEHATA: Well, the first point is that up until a week ago, it was thought that the Muslim Brotherhood was the leading opposition group in Egyptian politics.
RAZ: Right.
Prof. SHEHATA: But things have changed significantly over the last week, and the primary organizers behind the original January 25th demonstrations had nothing to do with Islamist politics, no affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood. They were largely youth and secular groups in addition to the anti-Mubarak (unintelligible) Mubarak group and then the National Association of Change, the Mohamed ElBaradei group.
But with regard to imagining a government that would be in charge of shepherding Egypt into free and fair elections for genuine reform to take place, there are many individuals in the country. The minister of industry is very well-respected, and I don't believe he's a member of the ruling party -along with figures like Mohamed ElBaradei, of course, along with the head of the Wafd, an opposition party. I think they could form some kind of an interim government that could shepherd Egypt until there are free and fair elections in the future.
RAZ: That's Samer Shehata. He's a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University.
Samer, thank you so much for coming in.
Prof. SHEHATA: You're welcome.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
Unidentified Group: Mubarak has to go. Hey, hey, ho, ho, Mubarak has to go.
RAZ: That's a crowd outside the Egyptian embassy here in Washington, D.C., today. They were calling on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down. Now, many of those who turned out have family in Egypt - including Karim Ali(ph), who's been in sporadic contact with relatives in Cairo.
Mr. KARIM ALI: You know, the Internet and cell phones were down yesterday but this morning, cell phones are working and we're able to communicate with them. And thank God they were all doing very well.
RAZ: Loay Yusef(ph) has family there, too, many of whom are taking part in the street demonstrations.
Mr. LOAY YUSEF: My father-in-law went out for about 10 minutes. He couldn't hang with the young guys. So he went up - gone back inside the apartment. But he said it's getting pretty bad there.
RAZ: One protester we met at the embassy, Mohamed Hafa(ph), says he hasn't yet been able to reach his family back home.
Mr. MOHAMED HAFA: It scares me a little, but I - at the same time, I feel like, you know, everybody in Egypt is working hard and - to end this regime. And I'm sure that they are some of the people that are doing that, and I wish them luck. And, you know - hold onto this whole thing will be successful and I will hear from them again.
RAZ: Demonstrators outside the Egyptian embassy here in Washington.
Robert Malley worked the Mideast desk at the National Security Council under President Clinton. He's now the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. He says all of the protests in the region and Egypt and in Tunisia and even Yemen are, in many ways, linked.
Mr. ROBERT MALLEY (Program Director for Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group): I think what we're seeing in Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen and elsewhere is not just protest about living conditions, about poverty, about...
RAZ: Regimes.
Mr. MALLEY: ...about regimes. It's also the symptom of a sense of powerlessness, of impotence, of humiliation, lack of dignity that the Arabs have felt now for a long time but in particular over the last period, where you've seen the war in Iraq, we have seen the dismantlement of the Palestine Authority during the second uprising intifada. You now see the humiliation of the Palestinians, who are not able to get anything from Israel.
Step after step, you've seen Arab as being the past - expected on history. And I think that, as much as anything else, is what is propelling people who've been unhappy about the lack of bread and jobs and a voice for decades. There's nothing new. What's new is that right now, they have no hope that their leaders can give them any sense of dignity of nationhood.
RAZ: And what's new, of course, is that there is this medium, primarily Al Jazeera...
Mr. MALLEY: Right.
RAZ: ...that millions can see and they can watch, and they can find out what's happening...
Mr. MALLEY: Right.
RAZ: ...elsewhere.
Mr. MALLEY: And I mean, this has been, obviously, a boom for Al Jazeera - very great few weeks for them. They were the ones who really covered the Tunisian uprising, and perhaps helped it in a significant way. And they're now on the air showing what's happening in Egypt. This has been an Al Jazeera moment.
RAZ: There's a lot of talk about stability in Egypt. I wonder: If that government were to collapse and, say, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the only real credible opposition in Egypt, were to fill that power vacuum, would that bring about the kind of stability that the United States would want to see?
Mr. MALLEY: It's doubtful that it's the kind of stability the U.S. would want to see. I think that's precisely why Hillary Clinton and others are being very caged about this.
RAZ: They're afraid. They're afraid of that.
Mr. MALLEY: They're afraid of that scenario. It's President Mubarak's playbook. Every time there's a threat, he says it's a threat from the Muslim Brotherhood; it's a threat from the Islamists and therefore, Islamic radicalism. And therefore, the U.S. has to be on its side.
RAZ: Yeah.
Mr. MALLEY: This time, it seemed at one point, you know, it wasn't going to work. The Muslim Brotherhood had nothing to do with the demonstrations earlier in the week.
RAZ: You worked at the National Security Council once, right...
Mr. MALLEY: Right.
RAZ: ...under President Clinton. What are the options that the administration now has?
Mr. MALLEY: First, I think they're trying to gather as much information as they can - which everyone is trying to do, and it's not so easy. And second, I think, really, they're trying to calibrate what should they say. Because they know that what they say, people pay attention to. And they know that what they say or don't say can get them in trouble. So I think it's really at that level - what are we trying to do, what are we saying to the regimes themselves? What are we encouraging them to do, and what are going to say publicly?
It's a very delicate balancing act, and it's sort of the price of decades and decades of a - unhealthy bargain. By dealing with regimes that are repressive, yes, but pro-American, we get what we want. And that bargain is now collapsing because we can't have everything we want. We could side with regimes at great cost -our reputation in the region and perhaps at great cost, our interest in the future. Or we could side with the protesters. And that, too, could come with great peril.
RAZ: That's Robert Malley. He's a former Middle East peace negotiator with the State Department, and now the program director for the Middle East and North Africa at the International Crisis Group. His latest article, co-authored with Hussein Agha, can be found in the New York Review. It's called "Who's Afraid of the Palestinians?"
Robert Malley, thank you.
Mr. MALLEY: My pleasure.
GUY RAZ, host:
This week, Egypt became a country that for the moment, is definitely not tourist friendly. Tourism brings in more than $11 billion into the Egyptian economy each year. But after the protest began, tour operators outside Egypt started to cancel trips, and it's left a lot of vacation plans up in the air.
NPR's Serri Graslie has our story.
SERRI GRASLIE: Kurt Kutay is the president of Wildland Adventures, a company that organizes adventure-based travel around the world. When protests started in Egypt earlier this week, he considered canceling an upcoming trip there. But when the government cut off all communication, the decision was made for him.
Mr. KURT KUTAY (President, Wildland Adventures): Now we can't reach, you know, anybody. So we're going to be refunding our guests 100 percent of what they had paid. But, you know, we can't otherwise confirm what's happening in Egypt at all.
GRASLIE: Kutay says his company specializes in taking visitors off the beaten path, and that might sometimes involve trekking through areas with political unrest. But he says in the last 25 years, there have never been any big problems because they've always had eyes on the ground.
Mr. KUTAY: You know, we have to be able to communicate with the people we work with. And when we can't communicate with them at all, then that puts us in a much more precarious position to be able to make the right judgment for the safety of our guests.
GRASLIE: Intrepid Travel, another adventure tour company, sends around 3,000 people to Egypt each year. Matt Berna, the company's U.S. general manager, says his crew is relying on a satellite phone to stay in touch. He has a permanent staff in Cairo who can deal with current travelers and will be there to greet arriving ones.
Mr. MATT BERNA (U.S. General Manager, Intrepid Travel): In some cases, clients from the U.S. have already departed, so they'll be met on the ground by one of our ground ops team, and then transferred to the hotel.
GRASLIE: Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. State Department issued a travel alert, advising Americans to avoid any non-essential travel to Egypt. But that hasn't been enough to change the minds of some travelers, who will be arriving in the country in the next few days.
Ronen Paldi, with Ya'lla Tours, says only one couple has backed out of a group due to arrive this weekend. Paldi had his Egyptian staff stay home so they'd have landline access. Yesterday, he was talking with his hotel manager every hour to make sure they were able to keep in touch. He was also changing reservations from hotels downtown to those near the airport and military headquarters.
Mr. RONEN PALDI (President, Ya'lla Tours USA): That's also where the president is, and it's very well-protected - and it's very quiet. They're flying on Sunday anyway to Luxor to start the Nile cruise, and they will be out of any harm's way within 24 hours of their arrival to Cairo as it is.
GRASLIE: Berna and Paldi did not report many tourists backing out of trips. Paldi says he thinks there is a sense among travelers that the turmoil won't last too long.
Mr. PALDI: I think people are looking at the situation very closely, and everybody believes that sooner than later, the situation will be resolved.
GRASLIE: In fact, right before I spoke with him, he received a new reservation: a family of seven, for a trip in April.
Serri Graslie, NPR News.
GUY RAZ, host:
Most friendships are formed because of common interests - books or politics or shopping, or whatever. Race and religion and gender also play a part. But a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says biology may also be a big factor.
James Fowler is a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego. And he says our genes could be making some of those decisions for us.
Dr. JAMES FOWLER (Professor of Medical Genetics and Political Science, University of California, San Diego): Nicholas Christakis and I have been studying social networks for some time. And we've made this argument that social networks are in our nature. And we've been turning our attention to this idea that social networks are not just social; they're also biological.
And so in this particular study, we actually hypothesize that this process, where we would tend to choose friends who are like us, not only exists at the social level but the biological, even the genetic level - that we would find that our friends not only share our behaviors and our interests; they might even share genes in common.
RAZ: We often hear, of course, the clich�d phrase: Birds of a feather flock together. But at the same time, they say opposites attract. I don't know which one to pick. What do you think?
Dr. FOWLER: We've looked at several genes, and we found one gene that exhibited this birds-of-a-feather property - that if you have it, your friend is also more likely to have it. We also found one where if you have a version of the gene, then your friend is likely to have the opposite version.
RAZ: Hmm.
Dr. FOWLER: I think what we're going to find is that there are different systems at play. And so with the dopamine gene that we found - that we share in common with our friends - there's a very intuitive explanation there, because it's related to this behavior that's very social behavior.
But for the opposites-attract genes, we might find things like genes that are related to the immune system. It's been known for some time that people tend to choose spouses who have different immune systems, because you don't want to be exposed to a disease that you're susceptible to. You spend a lot of time with your spouse, and so if they get it, then you're definitely going to get it. You want them to be able to fight off all those diseases that you can't fight off.
We expect that we might find this in friends as well because we spend a lot of time with our friends.
RAZ: This gene that you found is also the same gene that is associated with alcoholism. So how does that translate into picking friends?
Dr. FOWLER: Well, it's interesting. The genes that we would tend to find that are similar to us could have gotten similar in two different ways. One is that you actively choose friends who are like you in a way that's related to the gene. So if the gene is associated with drinking behavior, you might be slightly more likely to drink, and you might choose friends who like to drink because -
RAZ: That seems - right. That seems intuitive.
Dr. FOWLER: That seems - yeah, that's right. Another possibility is that maybe you're not choosing friends actively at all who are like you, but you're drawn to similar environments. And so if you have a version of this gene, you might be more likely to end up in a bar, where other people who have a version of this gene are also more likely to end up - and you might just happen to make friends with people who are near you.
RAZ: I guess this sort of gives new meaning to this notion of a drinking buddy.
Dr. FOWLER: Yes. And, you know, there are some larger points from this study here. I think people, they're very focused on, you know, which gene is it and what does this gene do? But there's a larger point here, which is that we might find ourselves not only biologically susceptible to a particular behavior, but if we are similar to our friends biologically, then we're also surrounded by other people who are susceptible.
And what you get in these networks is, you get these patchworks of localized susceptibility that are created by our genes than genes of those around us.
RAZ: But couldn't this be a problem if people who are alcoholics, for example, are attracted to other alcoholics? I mean, doesn't this actually make the situation worse?
Dr. FOWLER: Absolutely, and this is a point that we make. There can be feedback effects that we never thought of before when we were just looking at your genes and your behavior. Our genes not only influence us, but they may influence the genes of our friends - which in turn, has an additional effect on us.
So for example, the DRD2 gene variant that we study in this particular research has been associated with alcoholism. And if you have this gene variant, your friends are likely to have it, too. So you're not only more susceptible to alcoholism, but you're likely to be surrounded by friends who are susceptible as well.
RAZ: Do you use Facebook, Dr. Fowler?
Dr. FOWLER: I do. Absolutely.
RAZ: And so do your genes affect who you friend on Facebook, or is that...
(Soundbite of laughter)
Dr. FOWLER: I wouldn't say that you are genetically similar to all of the hundreds of friends that you might find yourself surrounded by. But certainly, among that group of people, the real friends, the people that you see every day in real life, I would expect there to be some similarity at the genetic level.
RAZ: That's James Fowler. He's a professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego and the author of "Connected: How Your Friends' Friends' Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think and Do."
James Fowler, thank you so much.
Dr. FOWLER: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Oregon Trail - not the historic path of Western expansion, but perhaps the most popular educational computer game of all time.
(Soundbite of video game, "Oregon Trail")
RAZ: Ah, yes. Fording the river, changing a broken wagon wheel, dying of dysentery - happy memories for millions of schoolchildren who since 1971, have spent hours pretending to set off on that 2,000-mile-long journey in the year 1848.
(Soundbite of video game, "Oregon Trail")
Unidentified Man: Well, are you ready? Come on. Let's go.
RAZ: The game is now on the iPhone. And next week, another version is set to launch on Facebook.
Now, the story of how Oregon Trail was created begins in 1971. Don Rawitsch was teaching junior high in Minneapolis, and he was having trouble getting his students interested in U.S. history. So with help from his roommates, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, they invented a basic computer program where kids could pick characters, and then trace the Oregon Trail.
And Rawitsch first tested it on those same students, on the school's only teletype machine.
Mr. DON RAWITSCH (Creator, "Oregon Trail"): It was like the size of an IBM Selectric typewriter, let's say, but on a big pedestal.
RAZ: And there was no screen, we should say.
Mr. RAWITSCH: No screen.
RAZ: Right.
Mr. RAWITSCH: It was all handled by text printing out on paper.
RAZ: Right.
Mr. RAWITSCH: So that had to be wheeled up, put next to the classroom phone I had. And in those days, you connected a computer to a phone line by taking the handset of the phone and kind of slamming it into a box...
RAZ: Right.
Mr. RAWITSCH: ...that had cups on it. And so that's how we made the connection.
I had the kids divide up into small groups so that they could try running the program, and rotated them through. While one group was on the computer, the other groups were doing other things to prepare.
RAZ: How did the kids respond to it? Was it a hit right away?
Mr. RAWITSCH: Well, they certainly were excited. They probably didn't get to use the computer that often in school, and here was a chance. And it was something different than the textbook. And it was an opportunity for them to make their own decisions and try to solve a real problem.
RAZ: We're going to jump forward now 40 years - because of the history of what happened with Oregon Trail is too complex to go into detail here. But essentially, this game became an enormous hit, still played by kids all over the United States. Some 65 million copies of this game have been sold worldwide. Did you ever imagine it would be this huge?
Mr. RAWITSCH: No, no. Not at all. There wasn't really a consumer market for software in those days because we didn't even have personal computers yet. So I think we were more taken by the fact that we could actually figure out a way to program the computer to do these things, and that was kind of a victory enough.
RAZ: Well, Don, I can tell you, I loved playing the game as a kid. And I will make sure that when my kid is old enough to play a computer, I will have him play the latest version of Oregon Trail. This is a game where, you know, kids -and some adults - learn about history and geography, economics and so on. I wonder what lessons you have learned from making this game.
Mr. RAWITSCH: Well, as I've studied about the Oregon Trail and helped to create the game, I came away with four lessons that I think are pretty valuable in life. Number one, plan ahead; there's danger out there. Number two, be patient; the journey is long. Number three, if you persevere you'll find your green valley. And number four, even if the water is deep, sometimes you just have to caulk your wagon and head out from shore.
RAZ: And number five, you end up in Oregon if it all works out - which isn't a bad place to be.
Mr. RAWITSCH: Very cool.
RAZ: That's Don Rawitsch. He's one of the creators of the original "Oregon Trail" computer game. It celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. He joined us from his home in Evanston, Illinois.
Don, thank you so much.
Mr. RAWITSCH: You're very welcome.
GUY RAZ, host:
Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
One night in 1960, a chess player named Frank Brady sat down for dinner in a Greenwich Village tavern. Brady had just founded a national chess magazine.
Across the table from him was Bobby Fischer, just a teenager and already a grand master of the game. Now, Fischer was never without his pocket chessboard, and as the two men huddled over the dinner table, he pulled it out and began to rehearse for an upcoming match.
Mr. FRANK BRADY (Author, "Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall"): (Reading) His fingers sped by in a blur, and his face showed the slightest of smiles, as if in a revelry. He whispered barely audibly: Well, if he plays that, I can block his bishop.
And then, raising his voice so loud that some of the customers stared: He wouldn't play that. I began to weep quietly, aware that in that time-suspended moment, I was in the presence of genius.
RAZ: But Fischer was a troubled genius who eventually disappeared into a fog of paranoia and hatred and died in exile in Iceland in 2008.
Frank Brady is the author of a new book about his old friend. That's his voice you just heard. The book's called "Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness." And Frank Brady joins me now from our studios in New York.
Welcome to the program.
Mr. BRADY: Thank you for inviting me.
RAZ: You knew Bobby Fischer. First, how did you meet him, and what kind of impression did he make on you?
Mr. BRADY: Well, I first heard about him from his chess teacher, Carmine Nigro, and he was telling me that he had this young kid who was really master strength already, and he was just a child.
And then I was playing in a tournament on the Upper West Side, and I saw this boy playing. And even in between the rounds, the rounds lasted about five hours for a game, he was playing chess in between the rounds. He couldn't get enough of it.
RAZ: This was in the late 1950s.
Mr. BRADY: Exactly. Or maybe mid-'50s.
RAZ: And he just - this was a kid who was unquestionably, clearly special.
Mr. BRADY: There was something special. And I remember some older man kibitzing the game, and Bobby spun around, and he said: Please, this is a chess game. You know, the man was about 65 years old, and he was silenced by this child.
RAZ: He was, what, 9, 8, 9, 10, 11?
Mr. BRADY: No. He was more like 10 or 11, I think, at that point.
RAZ: He was an international grandmaster by the age of 15, I should mention.
Mr. BRADY: By 15, he had become the youngest international grandmaster in the history of the game.
RAZ: What was it about the way his mind worked, the way he played the game that made him so extraordinary?
Mr. BRADY: Well, first of all, he was probably the foremost student of the game. He spent six to eight hours every single day studying past games, studying contemporary games. He learned Russian and Serbo-Croat and other languages so that he could follow the games in those newspapers and magazines.
And his chess was extremely lucid. It was crystal clear. You knew what he was going to do, but there was no way you could stop it.
RAZ: He sort of drew you in.
Mr. BRADY: Exactly. And it was - if I could make a musical analogy, he was sort of more Bach than Beethoven, more Rembrandt than (unintelligible). I mean, it was very clear what he was trying to do. There were no secrets. There were no cheap traps.
RAZ: You just couldn't get out of it.
Mr. BRADY: You couldn't get out of it. He was like, you know, the cobra, and he was going to get you.
RAZ: Unfortunately, and obviously what - some of the things I do want to ask you about, are the things that Bobby Fischer became better known for, which was his eccentric behavior.
We begin to see him reveal that, and you write about this in the book, his sort of shining, glorious moment was in 1972, when he faces Boris Spassky in the world championships match.
I mean, he's riding high. He is a hero. This is a match that is a Cold War showdown. And yet, he's unsatisfied, to some extent.
Mr. BRADY: He's unsatisfied. He wins the world championship, and yet he despised the publicity he was getting. And he became a recluse. He moved to Los Angeles. He got himself a small basement apartment. He gave no interviews. He played no chess.
He became a voracious reader, and he read everything, sometimes, hate letter (unintelligible) unfortunately.
RAZ: He was, as you say, living in this kind of dump of an apartment in Los Angeles, living off his mother's Social Security checks just a year or two after he was offered millions of dollars in endorsements. At this point, he starts to become more sort of vocal in expressing anti-Jewish sentiments. I mean, do you think that he was - he suffered from a pretty serious psychological condition?
Mr. BRADY: I think he was paranoid. I think he was disturbed. I think he was neurotic. He did not have hallucinations. He did not have total delusions, except that they were touching upon his paranoia. In a sense, it makes him look worse because if he - if you could say he was mentally ill, you might forgive some of the statements he's made. But I don't think he was what you would call crazy.
RAZ: The last time many people heard from Bobby Fischer was shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. He was in the Philippines at the time, making regular appearances on the radio. And what he said that day, of course, is shocking.
It sounds like something you might hear from Charles Manson, I mean, basically saying the United States got what it deserved, and cry - you crybabies whine, your time is coming. He calls for the death of the president at the time and again, some anti-Semitic remarks.
Mr. BRADY: I'll tell you that when I heard those statements, and they were on the Internet, so I could actually hear them, not only just read them, I personally went ballistic. I was horrified by it. And I didn't want anything to do with Fischer from there on in. I didn't want to honor him in any way.
I didn't - but after thinking about it for a number of years, to me, it was a little bit like Wagner. You know, can we listen to the music of Wagner, even though he was, you know, an anti-Semite and Hitler's favorite composer? Can we separate the man from the art? And that is what I was able to do to enable me, actually - I had gotten many offers to write a new biography of Fischer, and I had turned them down until I came to terms with this philosophically.
RAZ: Bobby Fischer died in exile in Iceland in 2008. He - obviously, you knew him, Frank Brady. How do you think we should remember this very complex legacy of this very complex person?
Mr. BRADY: Well, you know, paraphrasing Churchill, he was an enigma inside of a conundrum. Think of him as the greatest chess player that ever lived, the Mozart of chess, if you will. And then think of him also as a failed human being who fell tremendously and quickly and swiftly fell from grace.
RAZ: That's Frank Brady. He's the author of "Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - From America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness."
Frank Brady, thank you so much.
Mr. BRADY: My pleasure.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
So we're coming up on February and Black History Month, and the jazz bassist, Marcus Shelby, whose music you're hearing right now, he seems to know it.
His new album is one big meditation on the Civil Rights Movement, and it was just released. And NPR Music's jazz blogger Patrick Jarenwattananon is tapping his toes, actually, your pen, in the studio next to me because this is a recording you are very excited about.
PATRICK JARENWATTANANON: Indeed, I am. Good to be here, Guy.
RAZ: I know that a lot of jazz musicians took up the cause of civil rights in the '50s and in the '60s. How does Shelby do it on this record?
JARENWATTANANON: Well, in 2011, I would think you would have to do it in a sort of personal way, I mean, especially for Marcus Shelby. He was born in 1966, I believe.
RAZ: So he was a baby during this era, obviously.
JARENWATTANANON: Right. And so as far as the music goes, he approached it in three different ways. There were parts where he writes original music based on historical events like the lynching of Emmett Till. There's also music which he interprets from that time period, anything between Curtis Mayfield and Charles Mingus.
And he also goes into spirituals. Spirituals were, of course, an important part of the soundtrack to the Civil Rights Movement, and he arranges them for his large jazz orchestra, like the one we've been listening to, it's called "Amen."
(Soundbite of song, "Amen")
Unidentified People: (Singing) Amen, amen, amen, amen, amen.
RAZ: That's music from Marcus Shelby. The album is called "Soul of the Movement: Meditations On Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."
Patrick, what have you got next?
JARENWATTANANON: I want to play a bit from a much smaller band called Plunge. Its lineup has changed over time, but the one constant is a trombonist named Mark McGrain.
(Soundbite of song, "Tin Fish Tango")
RAZ: Wow, that's like - it's almost like a Balkan brass band meets a backup for a beat poet.
JARENWATTANANON: Yeah. Something like that. It's only three people: trombone, saxophone and stand up bass.
RAZ: And I'm certainly noticing an absence of drums here.
JARENWATTANANON: I think that's the idea. This song is called "Tin Fish Tango." It's the name of their new album as well. And for me, listening to this record, it's - I hear that Balkan thing. I also hear a New Orleans thing going on...
RAZ: Oh, you're right. Right.
JARENWATTANANON: ...because you get that low brass and bass connection.
RAZ: Yeah.
JARENWATTANANON: And that makes sense. These guys are from New Orleans.
(Soundbite of song, "Tin Fish Tango")
RAZ: Yeah. It's not that sort of party music, that kind of Bourbon Street sound that you hear out of New Orleans.
JARENWATTANANON: You know, you definitely hear the brass band roots here, but there's this other thing. There are these three tracks on this album where the three people just sort of collectively improvise. And there's some unusual structures into how the other pieces are laid out too.
So it's abstracted a little bit from the dance floor, which is very un-New Orleans, but at the same time, you can definitely hear the sort of New Orleans genetic material.
(Soundbite of song, "Tin Fish Tango")
RAZ: Music from a trio called Plunge off the album "Tin Fish Tango."
I'm here listening to new jazz releases with NPR Music's jazz blogger Patrick Jarenwattananon.
Patrick, what else have you got for us?
JARENWATTANANON: Here's another unconventional kind of a chamber jazz work, in air quotes. This is music by the drummer Paul Motian.
(Soundbite of song, "Mode VI")
RAZ: This is absolutely stunning, beautiful music. I think you said the drummer Paul Motian. I don't hear any drumming here, do I?
JARENWATTANANON: I did. These are Paul Motian's compositions. They're scored by a New York-based guitarist named Joel Harrison. But Paul Motian doesn't actually play on this album.
RAZ: So this is a drummer-less band.
JARENWATTANANON: Right. If you've ever heard Paul Motian drumming, you really owe it to yourself to check it out if you haven't. I mean, he's almost 80 now. And it's like, the older he gets - it's almost the weirder he gets, doesn't like to play straight time a lot, sort of dances in and outside of the beat.
And just as he's kind of a weird drummer, he's kind of a weird composer in a very good way, lots of fits and starts and sort of staggers the way he groups notes and rests and pauses.
He's also a master of especially ballads, these sort of free-floating, loose, odd-time feel, but ultimately really beautiful tunes.
(Soundbite of song, "Mode VI")
RAZ: That's Joel Harrison with "The Music Of Paul Motian." Patrick, we have time for just one more recording that you brought in this week.
JARENWATTANANON: All right. Let's go with a blast from the past.
(Soundbite of song, "Caravan")
RAZ: This sounds so familiar. It's on the tip of my tongue. What am I hearing?
JARENWATTANANON: It should. It's the melody of "Caravan," which was written by a trombonist in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
RAZ: Right.
JARENWATTANANON: His name is Juan Tizol. This is, of course, not the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
RAZ: Right.
JARENWATTANANON: This arrangement comes from an Italian film composer named Piero Umiliani. He is best known for writing the tune "Mah Na Mah Na," of The Muppets fame.
RAZ: The Muppets song.
(Soundbite of song, "Mah Na Mah Na")
Unidentified Man #1: (Singing) Mah na mah na. Mah na mah na.
RAZ: He wrote that, that same guy?
JARENWATTANANON: And in 1974, for whatever reason, he wanted to make a Duke Ellington record.
(Soundbite of music)
JARENWATTANANON: This is music that he really enjoyed. So he rounded up a bunch of Italian musicians and recorded it for a jazz label called Horo, H-O-R-O.
So enter this new Italian label called Dejavu, Dejavu one word, and they contracted with an English DJ impresario-type named Gilles Peterson, and he went through the whole Horo catalog, and the result is this compilation. It's called "Horo: A Jazz Portrait."
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Who was that Muppet who sang "Mah Na Mah Na"?
JARENWATTANANON: I don't remember, actually.
RAZ: Is all the music on this CD, you know, kind of wacky like this?
JARENWATTANANON: Well, I will say this is the most sort of schizo version of this song I've ever heard. I mean, it bounces from really straight-ahead swing to these sort of synthesized beeps and bloops.
RAZ: And now, all I'm doing is picturing Muppets playing the instruments.
(Soundbite of laughter)
JARENWATTANANON: You know, if I were to characterize this collection as a whole, there's a little less of that. What I hear most of all, really, is the lasting influence of John Coltrane.
So if this was the 1970s, John Coltrane had only been dead for 10 years, not even, and so you hear a lot of his innovations, a lot of the modal jazz exploration on one or two chords and a lot of the blowing techniques and the way he writes tunes and thinks about grooves in music.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: Some Italian jazz recordings from the 1970s on "Horo: A Jazz Portrait." Patrick Jarenwattananon is a producer for NPR Music. And you can read more about all of these picks at A Blog Supreme. That's npr.org/blogsupreme.
Patrick, thanks again.
JARENWATTANANON: Always a pleasure to be here, Guy.
(Soundbite of music)
GUY RAZ, host:
Long before Vladimir Nabokov published his sensation, "Lolita," most of his colleagues knew him as an avid collector and researcher of butterflies.
And shortly after he emigrated to America in 1940, he landed a job at Harvard as the curator of Lepidoptera at the university's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But on the side and quietly, he'd write, prose, of course, but also poetry, including this one about, what else, butterflies.
Mr. VLADIMIR NABOKOV (Author, "Lolita"): I found it, and I named it, being versed in taxonomic Latin, thus became godfather to an insect and its first describer, and I want no other fame.
RAZ: That's a recording from 1952 of Nabokov reading his poem, "A Discovery." Nabokov once said that he might have spent his life hunting butterflies instead of writing books had it not been for the Russian Revolution. And he was particularly interested in a group of South American butterflies known as the Polyommatus blues.
And in 1945, he published his theories about where they might have come from originally.
Professor NAOMI PIERCE (Biology, Harvard University): He believed that they came from ancestors in Southeast Asia that had crossed the Bering Strait, entered down through North America, across the Isthmus of Panama and then radiated or speciated on the tops of the Andes in South America.
RAZ: That's Naomi Pierce. She's a professor of biology at Harvard who's been using modern technology to put Nabokov's theory to the test. She says that his research paper on the Polyommatus blues should have made a splash in the scientific community.
Prof. PIERCE: But as far as I can see, it sort of died without a trace. It's not a huge community, and there wasn't a lot of notes taken of this. But in later revisions of the group and systematic treatments of the group, his ideas were pretty much put to one side.
RAZ: At the time, he was teaching Russian and also comparative literature, I believe, at Wellesley. Did his colleagues, other entomologists, know this about him, that he was actually hoping to be a writer, or did they think that he was kind of a - this kind of crank, or was he taken seriously?
Prof. PIERCE: No, there was a terrific interview with Charles Remington, who was a famous entomologist at Yale, who knew Nabokov at the time and said he was absolutely amazed when "Lolita" was published because he had no idea that this fellow, who he knew as a lepidopterist, had these other ideas. He said he thought he was quite a dignified gentleman, so he was so surprised when he read "Lolita."
RAZ: Why was his theory so radical at the time?
Prof. PIERCE: It was radical because he proposed five new genre(ph) of butterflies. This is a very significant new slice of biodiversity, if you want to put it that way, and also because he had a very specific hypothesis for how it happened.
He said they came across the Bering Strait, but then all the North America relatives went extinct, and then there were four more invasions across the Bering Strait.
And he cites them in turn. He describes a biologist in a Wellsian time machine, coming up through the Cenozoic, and he says: First, they'll see this group and then the next group. And he's very precise about both the classification of those groups and the timing. And this is very unusual even in literature at the time to be so specific, to provide such a complex hypothesis.
RAZ: He didn't have sophisticated DNA testing equipment back then. So how did he come up with the theory? I mean, what did he do?
Prof. PIERCE: All of this was based on his knowledge of the finer features of the genitalia of the males of these butterflies.
RAZ: Professor Pierce, at the time, these theories were not taken too seriously by his contemporaries. You actually decided to test them out, and remarkably, you found that it's all right, that he was entirely correct. So were you surprised at what you found?
Prof. PIERCE: I was astonished. What really surprised me was when I went back, and I read the paragraph again talking about the traveler in the Wellsian time machine and I saw the distinct ordering that he gave for the groups that our time traveler would see as they come up through the Cenozoic era, that's when I was blown away, because he made these five predictions, and he was spot-on correct about all of them.
That's Naomi Pierce. She's a professor of biology and the curator of Lepidoptera at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Naomi Pierce, thank you.
Prof. PIERCE: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
The scene at Cairo's international airport was one of chaos today, as thousands of foreigners, tourists, business travelers and diplomats looked to get out.
NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson was at the airport earlier today and sent this report.
SORAYA SARHADDI NELSON: Traffic was backed up a mile outside of Cairo's main airport. Taxis and vans with suitcases piled on the roofs jockeyed for a better place in line. The terminals were equally chaotic.
Hundreds of passengers couldn't get inside because of the crowds. They rolled their suitcases into a long queue that extended into the parking lot.
Dutch citizen Else Leegte says her husband's company called them late last night, telling them to pack light and get to the airport. She says all she took with her were important papers and her laptop. Leegte says she doesn't even know where the jet the company chartered is taking them, other than somewhere in Europe.
Ms. ELSE LEEGTE: It's unreal. It's unreal. This is not the way I see Egypt. It's a shame, actually.
NELSON: New Zealander Angela Hey says her husband, Owen, works for Shell Oil Company, which also ordered the families of the employees to evacuate last night. She and their 13-year-old son, Nathan, and 11-year-old daughter, Rebecca, were being flown to Amsterdam, where Hey says they will try and figure out what to do next. She says they didn't want to go.
Ms. ANGELA HEY: Yeah, we've got some good friends that are still here. My driver, my maid, I mean, they have to stay behind. I'd like to think that we'll come back very soon. Yeah.
NELSON: The many Egyptians standing in line appeared less optimistic. Dozens pushed trolleys packed with multiple suitcases bursting at the seams because they planned to stay away for a long time.
Mariam Asaad is one who will be gone for at least a year. The 20-year-old pharmacy student hails from the Cairo neighborhood of Heliopolis, where Hosni Mubarak has his presidential palace. But she says she, her brother and dad were flying to Australia because they feel unsafe with thieves and thugs breaking into their neighbors' homes.
Ms. MARIAM ASAAD: You know, there's no policemen, there's nothing in Egypt at the moment, you know? So it's just horrible.
NELSON: She says it was a hard decision as they were forced to leave her mother and other relatives behind because they couldn't get a visa.
Ms. ASAAD: So we're still worried about the other people. We're still worried about our country, you know? So we don't know what to do.
NELSON: The U.S. embassy, meanwhile, issued a warning for Americans to leave the country as soon as possible.
Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, NPR News, Cairo.
GUY RAZ, host:
From NPR News, this is WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Guy Raz.
(Soundbite of tanks)
RAZ: The sound of tanks rumbling through the streets of Cairo today. It's day six of the popular uprising, and demonstrations across the country are growing. Thousands of people remain in Cairo's central Tahrir Square at this hour, and protesters say they won't retreat until President Hosni Mubarak steps down.
On the streets, soldiers are still mostly avoiding confrontations, and above the capital city, helicopters hover, watching the masses below.
President Obama has spoken to several world leaders. They are all calling for an orderly transition to a government that better reflects the aspirations of the people. For now, it appears Hosni Mubarak's days as Egypt's uncontested leader are numbered.
In a moment, chaotic scenes at Cairo's airport, as thousands of foreigners make their way out, and later, the reaction in Israel, a key ally of the Mubarak government. But first to NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro in Cairo on a day of growing uncertainty.
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: A show of force in the air, just as the curfew was supposed to be kicking in, F-16s flying repeatedly fast and low over Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the protests here. The message from the air may have been intimidation. On the ground, though, there was cooperation between the military and the protesters.
The army setting up checkpoints around the square, frisking for weapons and looking at IDs, but otherwise leaving those gathered alone.
Unidentified Group: (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And so the demonstrations continued past the curfew and into the night. At around 7 p.m., Nobel Peace laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, who is a key opposition figure here, came to the square for the first time.
Mr. MOHAMMED ELBARADEI (Nobel Peace Laureate): (Foreign language spoken)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: You are the owners of this revolution, he told the protesters, to cheers. You are the future. Our essential demand is the departure of the regime, he said.
But so far, there are few signs that President Hosni Mubarak is leaving. He appeared on state TV with a cadre of generals. The message he was seemingly trying to convey was that he is still in control of the country and, crucially, of the military. Their role in all of this is still unclear.
And in the square, there were mixed views. Ahmed Deif is a professor of engineering. He says the F-16s were meant to stop the protesters from coming out.
Dr. AHMED DEIF (Professor of Engineering, Nile University): They're actually trying to terrify people. They're trying to actually establish a kind of terrifying environment or a spirit so the people can leave. But definitely, the - we got the wrong message. They left us no option, actually, except to sit here until we get our - all our requirements done and all what we would like to happen happening.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But the army, unlike the police, is highly respected, and so far, it has shown restraint. Protester Yasser Muhammed lauded them.
Mr. YASSER MUHAMMED: We are together, army forces and the Egyptian people. We are together. We are one, one people.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But there were no mixed feelings regarding America's role here. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took to the talk shows in the U.S. This is her in an appearance on "Meet the Press."
Secretary HILLARY CLINTON (Department of State): I want the Egyptian people to have the chance to chart a new future. It needs to be an orderly, peaceful transition to real democracy, not faux democracy like the elections we saw in Iran two years ago.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: On the same show, she tried to deflect questions about America's support of the Mubarak regime.
Sec. CLINTON: President Mubarak and his government have been an important partner to the United States. I mean, let's not, you know, just focus on today. This is a government that made and kept a peace with Israel that was incredibly important.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Back in the square, those ties were the subject of outrage. The U.S. provides Egypt with a billion dollars of military aid a year. The F-16s and the tear gas canisters that were fired at the demonstrators were all made in America.
So you're holding a sign that says USA, support the people, not the tyrant. Why?
Mr. KHALED TANTAWI: Because the U.S. is advocating for human rights and everything, and they say that they care about human rights. They do not care about human rights. They care about their interests in the Middle East. They do not care about the people.
Mr. MUHAMMED: Please, Mr. Obama, Mr. Obama, you should be - tell Mubarak leave us now.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Khaled Tantawi and Yasser Muhammed. The demonstrators seem to come from a mix of backgrounds. Some traveled from the provinces, others from a few blocks away. So far, though, the protesters haven't coalesced around any particular leader. They say they want the ballot box to decide who the future president of Egypt will be.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Cairo.
GUY RAZ, host:
Now, while the crisis in Egypt has captivated the Arab world, there's been a notable silence from Israel. That's in part because anything Israeli leaders say now could inflame the situation.
Egypt is one of the only countries in the Arab world with full diplomatic ties to Israel, and perhaps Israel's most important strategic ally in the region. But it's also a deeply unpopular relationship among many Egyptians who sympathize with the plight of the Palestinians.
So what might happen to that alliance if Hosni Mubarak is ousted? For more, I'm joined by Aluf Benn. He's editor-at-large for the Israel newspaper Haaretz. He's in Tel Aviv.
Welcome.
Mr. ALUF BENN (Editor-At-Large, Haaretz): Hi.
RAZ: First, Hosni Mubarak has been an important partner for a succession of Israeli government. Is it fair to say that the current government in Israel is worried?
Mr. BENN: Obviously, it is. As it has been in the past several years, Israelis have been worried about succession in Egypt. I argued long ago that if Israeli leaders could make one wish, it would not be to do away with the Iranian regime or with the Iranian nuclear program. It would be to find a life-extending medication for President Mubarak to be there indefinitely because he was seen in Israel as the cornerstone of stability in the region.
And Prime Minister Netanyahu, in his first and only reaction to the events in Egypt, stated that Israel cares for stability. And I believe that behind closed doors and even semi-closed doors, the main fear in Israel is the rise of an Islamic republic next door.
RAZ: So you're saying essentially that the alliance between Israel and Egypt hinges on the personality of this one man, on the personality of Hosni Mubarak?
Mr. BENN: No, but it hinges on the structure of the regime built around Mubarak. And if it's replaced by an Iranian-style Islamic republic, fiercely anti-Israeli, which unlike Iran is not 1,500 kilometers away but around the corner with very modern army, with the most sophisticated American weapons, it's a different ballgame for Israel.
RAZ: Now, there are economic agreements, military and security agreements between Israel and Egypt. If those were to unravel, what kind of instability would that create for Israel?
Mr. BENN: Well, the peace treaty with Egypt allowed Israel to cut its defense expenditures since the mid-'80s to this day. It fueled economic growth in Israel, and it also allowed Israel to concentrate its strategic interests and military effort in the north and in the West Bank and Gaza, while the Egyptian front that was the main front of Israeli-Arab wars from 1948 through the mid-'70s has been quiet.
RAZ: Aluf Benn, Israel has long argued that its security concerns over borders, for example, are directly related to the potential for instability in neighboring countries. Does the situation in Egypt in some way play into the more intractable positions taken by the current Netanyahu government? In other words, is there an element of I told you so going on here?
Mr. BENN: Of course, there is, because Netanyahu has argued for years that we cannot trust the peace treaties because they are hinged on the personalities of leaders who might be there today and not be there tomorrow.
And only recently, Netanyahu reminded his audiences that we had peace with Iran, with very close cooperation during the shah. And then overnight, the shah disappeared, and we got the (unintelligible) regime in power there. And the same might happen elsewhere.
RAZ: That's Aluf Benn. He's editor-at-large for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, speaking from his office in Tel Aviv.
Aluf Benn, thank you.
Mr. BENN: Thank you.
GUY RAZ, host:
We're back with ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.
The State of the Union may be over, but the State of the State addresses, those are the ones given by governors each year, have just begun.
California's Jerry Brown and Wisconsin's Scott Walker deliver theirs this weekend. If you've heard any of the others so far, you might have noticed the theme.
Governor ANDREW CUOMO (Democrat, New York): What is the State of the State?
Governor SUSANA MARTINEZ (Republican, New Mexico): We must not sugarcoat it.
Governor RICK SNYDER (Republican, Michigan): We're in a crisis unmatched...
Gov. MARTINEZ: New Mexico...
Gov. SNYDER: ...in the last 60 years of our state.
Gov. MARTINEZ: ...is in a state of financial crisis.
Governor JOHN HICKENLOOPER (Democrat, Colorado): We have to deal with a roughly $1 billion shortfall.
Governor BRIAN SANDOVAL (Republican, Nevada): My budget recommends the consolidation, elimination (unintelligible) agencies.
Governor SAM BROWNBACK (Republican, Kansas): ...$191 million in spending cuts.
Gov. CUOMO: This is a time of crisis for our state.
Governor CHRIS CHRISTIE (Republican, New Jersey): We cannot continue to spend money we don't have.
Gov. MARTINEZ: No more shell games. No more rosy projections.
Gov. CHRISTIE: We cannot print money, and we cannot run deficits.
Governor NIKKI HALEY (Republican, South Carolina): This budget year is going to hurt.
RAZ: Grim sounds from some of the recent State of the State addresses. We heard from the governors of New York, Nevada, New Mexico, Michigan, South Carolina, Kansas, New Jersey and Colorado.
States are bracing for massive budget cuts. In Colorado, for example, the budget gap is more than a billion dollars, and many school districts there are already on a four-day week.
I asked the governor, John Hickenlooper, to give us a sense of his predicament.
Gov. HICKENLOOPER: Well, without a question, this is the most serious recession in my lifetime. And most of the people here in the statehouse are saying they haven't seen anything like this in, you know, in 75 or 100 years.
RAZ: Now, unlike the federal government, Colorado, like most states, is not allowed to run deficits. It is also very difficult to raise taxes in Colorado. So is your only real option at this point to make cuts that may be drastic?
Gov. HICKENLOOPER: Well, in fact, you're right. The legislature can't increase taxes. It has to go to a vote of the people. And that's, in this economy, certainly unlikely. And what that really means is certainly for a fact in this legislative session is the only solution we have is cuts.
You can't borrow. You can't put it off till tomorrow. We just need to gather everyone in a circle and say, all right, here are the options, and here are the legitimate consequences. If we cut this much out of higher education, here's how they're going to feel it in classrooms.
RAZ: You have a close to 9 percent unemployment rate in Colorado, by no means near the top of the list in the United States, but still, obviously, significant. Do you think that folks in Colorado have a full understanding of what they are about to encounter over the next year or two?
Gov. HICKENLOOPER: No, I think most people are hoping that the economy will get better more rapidly than I think it will, hoping that we won't come to that point, which we're already at, that we are going to have to make the cuts.
Part of the difficulty is to make sure that we tell that message and explain what the cuts are going to look like, how they'll feel, what will they see in their daily life.
RAZ: In a sense, Governor Hickenlooper, are you in a position where, say, the economy does not improve in the next year or two, and you are the guy who signs this budget with these cuts, that you may actually be blamed for cutbacks in state programs?
Gov. HICKENLOOPER: Well, elected officials get blamed for things all the time that aren't their fault or responsibility. As mayor of Denver, I got blamed for snowstorms, you know, the list is long.
I think the key here is to focus people's attention as clearly and rapidly as possible that if you're not going to raise taxes, and these are very difficult cuts, the one thing you could do is to be more pro-business. And because this is Colorado, we want to make sure that we hold ourselves to the highest environmental standards to make sure we protect our land and waters, the highest ethical standards. But we've still got to be more pro-business.
In my inaugural address, we talked about - and the State of the State speech -maybe we should have, instead of - just as we have an environmental impact statement, maybe we should have a regulatory impact statement.
If the legislature is going to impose new regulations on business, let's take the time to examine what the unintended consequences might be and so that we don't create red tape, and that's part of how, I think, you get through the budget deficit is to cut red tape, help each small business hire that extra person.
RAZ: Governor Hickenlooper, most states pass a new budget each year. The federal government passes a new budget each year. You have talked about building a budget every two years. How would that help improve Colorado's fiscal situation?
Gov. HICKENLOOPER: Well, so many of the challenges we face in the budgeting stem from not sufficient planning. You know, when I ran my restaurants, we would never just do a one-year budget. We always had a three-year budget or a five-year budget, you know, some sort of a planning document that tried to anticipate unexpected costs, be ready for opportunities should they appear. I think the state should be doing the same thing.
RAZ: That's Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, speaking to me from his office in Denver.
Governor, thank you so much.
Gov. HICKENLOOPER: You bet.
RAZ: Sue Urahn is the managing director at the Pew Center on the States. And she says even before the recession, many economists, including those from the Government Accountability Office, predicted the fiscal nightmare that most states now face.
Ms. SUE URAHN (Managing Director, Pew Center on the States): There are some really significant factors that predate the recession. GAO did a report. They looked out over 50 years at what the fiscal situation of the states was going to be. And what they found was over that very long time period, there was going to be a $10 trillion gap that states would face.
And a lot of that was because of the increasing cost of health care. The cost of education is going up. What they are obligated to pay for their public employees' pensions and post-retirement benefits, those are fairly significant.
So those cost pressures are going up no matter what the states do, and the revenue is just not keeping pace.
RAZ: What can governors or legislatures do in the various states if they can't, say, raise taxes, for example, because voters have to approve tax hikes, or if they can't run deficits? Is it about cuts at this point?
Ms. URAHN: Really, at this point, given the public has not much appetite for tax increases, you've got at least a dozen new governors who have taken a no new taxes pledge, it's limiting in many cases what they can do and will focus them on spending cuts.
RAZ: So in a state like Colorado, where the legislature essentially has to cut about 15 percent of its budget, how would the average person in Colorado see that impact in the coming year?
Ms. URAHN: It may be everything from parks may not be open or even part of the public realm anymore. You may find that your driver's license office is only open three days a week instead of five, or you have to do it online now.
The court system may become far less efficient as there are fewer public employees to staff it. Your class sizes may get larger in the K-12 system. Your college tuition may go up pretty considerably. That's some of the impact, I think, the public will feel.
RAZ: Which states are in the deepest trouble financially? Which states will have to sort of overcome the biggest hurdles to get out of their situations?
Ms. URAHN: Well, there are several states that are facing pretty severe stress. I think Illinois has been much in the media of late. They are certainly under a lot of stress. California. You have states like Nevada and in Arizona. Nevada is, you know, the total size of the budget gap may not be big relative to the big states like New York, Illinois and California, but it's half of their general fund budget.
RAZ: How much does this present a risk to the full economic recovery that we're all hoping for and expecting?
Ms. URAHN: It is tremendously important for people to understand that the decisions that states make, whether on the spending or the revenue side, do have the potential to impact the national recovery.
You cannot make decisions at the state level absent that consideration. So the more that people are able to really understand the intertwined nature of those decisions, I think the better decisions are likely to be made in the long run.
RAZ: That's Sue Urahn. She's managing director at the Pew Center on the States.
Sue, thank you so much.
Ms. URAHN: Oh, you're very welcome.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
GUY RAZ, host:
Almost 4,000 stories came in this round of Three Minute Fiction here on Weekends on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. The challenge this time, there has to be a joke, and someone has to cry. Here's a sample from the mailbag.
BOB MONDELLO: What do you call a sleeping cow? A bulldozer. I try to think it as loudly as I can, as though the words could cut through the haze of medication and leap into Joseph's head. Joseph doesn't say anything; I know he's watching me. I can almost hear him at it, as though the steady beeps and mechanical whirrs are mocking his gaze and not my vitals.
Why did the snail paint an S on his car? So that people would say: Look at that S car go, I shout in my head. My eyes seem plastered shut, but I wiggle my fingers at this one. This is a routine we used to have, still have in a way. He tells a joke, then I tell a joke, and the comfort is in the eye-rolling. It's always the same set. The only difference now is that I can't answer, and he can't be certain that I'm listening.
SUSAN STAMBERG: Charidy's attention focuses. She recognizes the female in the fuzzy hooded jacket, the teddy bear. Charidy, we're here to get you some help.
Mustard on rye bread. No pickles, please. Charidy grins. Remembering that the teddy bear fed her in the past, she calms down, begins pulling her brown, mangy hair to the right side of her face. She twists it around, attempts to create a ponytail, as if she's fixing herself to meet someone.
When was the last time you took your medicine? Nineteen-ninety-nine ago, when I got my glass eye, she laughs from deep within, slaps both knees, flapping the bark about her like a child playing in fall leaves.
The teddy bear kneels down, speaks softly. Charidy, we need to get you to a safe place. Will you come with me? It's not as easy as it used to be.
RAZ: Excerpts from Three-Minute Fiction submissions by listeners Cynthia Gunadi out in Brookline, Massachusetts and Susanna Hartigan of New Smyrna Beach, Florida.
And thanks to our own Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg for reading those stories. To see full versions of those stories, go to npr.org/threeminutefiction, that's all spelled out, no spaces. We'll have more stories next weekend, a winner, we hope, in a few more weeks.
(Soundbite of clock ticking)
GUY RAZ, host:
Our top story this hour, of course, the ongoing demonstrations in Egypt. Thousands of protesters are still gathered in cities across that country despite a government curfew. Demonstrators are vowing to keep up the pressure until President Hosni Mubarak steps down.
And among the chants and slogans in those crowds are the words of an early 20th century Tunisian poet named Abdul Qasim al Shabi.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: One of his most famous poems has become a rallying cry, both in Egypt and before, in Tunisia. The poem is called "To the Tyrants of the World"
(Foreign language spoken)
Oppressive tyrants, lover of darkness, enemy of life, you have ridiculed the size of the weak people. Your palm is soaked with their blood.
You deformed the magic of existence, and planted the seeds of sorrow in the fields.
(Foreign language spoken)
Wait, don't be fooled by the spring, the clearness of the sky or the light of dawn, for on the horizon lies the horror of darkness, rumble of thunder, and blowing of winds.
Beware, for below the ash there is fire, and he who grows thorns reaps wounds. Look there, for I have harvested the heads of mankind and the flowers of hope, and I watered the heart of the earth with blood. I soaked it with tears until it was drunk. The river of blood will sweep you, and the fiery storm will devour you.
(Foreign language spoken)
RAZ: The poem "To the Tyrants of the World," written by the Tunisian poet Abdul Qasim al Shabi. In recent weeks, it's become the unofficial rallying cry for millions of Arabs in Egypt and in Tunisia. It was read for us by Ahmed Shihab-Eldin. Special thanks to Adel Iskandar for the English translation.
(Soundbite of music)
RAZ: You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
You're likely to recognize some of the film scores that made John Barry famous: "Born Free," "A Lion in Winter," "Midnight Cowboy" and a lot of James Bond movies. The Oscar-winning composer died yesterday.
NPR's Elizabeth Blair has this appreciation.
ELIZABETH BLAIR: In the 1966 movie "Born Free," a woman raises a lion cub and then teaches it to re-enter the wild. John Barry's sweeping score was just as poignant as the story.
(Soundbite of music)
BLAIR: John Barry was almost destined to write soundtracks. He was born in York, England. His mother was a classically trained pianist, and his father owned movie theaters. When he was a teenager, Barry quit school and went to work in one of the projection booths. He studied piano, and he was a big jazz fan. In the mid-1950s, he put together a group called The John Barry Seven.
But it's his work writing seductive, sometimes unnerving music for 007 that really made him famous.
(Soundbite of music)
BLAIR: In 2004, John Barry WHYY's FRESH AIR that when he was writing the soundtrack for "Goldfinger," he tried to imagine himself in the movie theater.
Mr. JOHN BARRY (Composer): Like when I used to go to my father's cinema and sit in the front row on a Saturday afternoon and get absolutely thrilled by what was going up there. I tried to put myself into that area.
BLAIR: John Barry wrote music for 11 Bond films. It started in the early 1960s, when he was asked to rework music for "Dr. No," including that iconic theme.
(Soundbite of music)
BLAIR: For years, John Barry and composer Monty Norman battled in court over who created James Bond's signature theme. Norman won.
John Barry's range was enormous. He drew from Gregorian chant for "A Lion in Winter," bluesy harmonica for "Midnight Cowboy," and he used soaring orchestral music in "Out of Africa." As one director put it, John Barry brought inimitable magic to each and every score.
Elizabeth Blair, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
The band Bright Eyes is a favorite of indie-rock fans in the past decade. It has sold millions of records. Bright Eyes' driving force is Conor Oberst. He's taken on a new role now, of political activist.
From member station NET Radio in Nebraska, Clay Masters reports.
CLAY MASTERS: Conor Oberst has had a busy 10 years. He's released five albums with Bright Eyes, two solo roots-rock albums, and has worked on a number of side projects. But he says taking a stand is something new to him.
Mr. CONOR OBERST (Musician): What I do is play music and, you know, it's not something I did when I first started making music. It's something, I guess, I grew into the more I became aware of the world and what power musicians and public figures have. I don't do it lightly. It's not something I enjoy -necessarily - doing, but I feel compelled to do it.
MASTERS: Oberst has been outspoken about immigration laws in the country, and it became personal when one showed up just 30 miles west of his hometown of Omaha. Since 2008, citizens of the small eastern Nebraska city of Fremont have been trying to get a law on the books that would ban renting to or hiring undocumented workers.
In the 1990s, the city became home to two meat-packing plants that attracted Hispanic immigrant workers. Proponents of the ordinance say the town of about 25,000 has seen an increase in costs for law enforcement and schools.
State Senator Charlie Janssen, of Fremont, goes a little farther.
State Senator CHARLIE JANSSEN (Nebraska): We have people that are here - we don't know their medical backgrounds, we don't know - especially - their criminal backgrounds, and that makes me nervous. I have two small children. They're people that could be handling my children, your children...
MASTERS: Janssen has introduced a proposal for Nebraska similar to the controversial Arizona immigration law. The city of Fremont is embroiled in two federal lawsuits over its own ordinance, which passed as a ballot referendum last year.
To raise awareness about this, Conor Oberst staged a massive, 14-band benefit concert last summer on a street in his hometown. Proceeds from the sold-out show went to the ACLU, one of the groups that have sued the city over the ordinance.
Mr. OBERST: I mean it from the bottom of my heart. It means so much that you guys came here tonight, and I want to thank all the bands that are playing tonight.
MASTERS: On the bill that night were Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings, a folk duo that drove from California. After a sing-along of the classic "This Land is Your Land," Dave Rawlings told the audience about buying a paper on the way to the gig.
Mr. DAVE RAWLINGS (Musician): And I saw Conor was on the cover of the paper.
(Soundbite of applause)
Mr. RAWLINGS: And then there was another woman who's a talk-show host or like, a radio talk host. And you know, she said that when musicians try to be political in any way, that they sound silly.
And I don't know. I mean, I don't think that Woody Guthrie was a silly man, and I don't think that "This Land is Your Land" is a silly song.
(Soundbite of applause)
Mr. RAWLINGS: And I have a feeling people are going to be singing "This Land is Your Land" long after they've forgotten that radio host and her professional political opinions.
(Soundbite of song, "This Land is Your Land")
Mr. RAWLINGS: (Singing) As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway. I saw below me that golden valley. This land was made for you and me.
MASTERS: Whether or not musicians have the ability to shape society's views is debatable. University of Nebraska-Lincoln music professor Scott Anderson has studied protest music, and teaches a class on the subject. He says music can have an impact on society, and you can look beyond protest songs to find how great that impact can be.
Mr. SCOTT ANDERSON (Music Professor, University of Nebraska-Lincoln): Look at the power that Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones - just keep going down the list - look at the power these artists have had in shaping culture, and in shaping the way we think about things.
MASTERS: But it was clear from the fans that came to Omaha from around the country that they were there primarily for the music.
Ms. MAUREEN O'BRIEN: Maureen O'Brien, Omaha, Nebraska.
MASTERS: Do you know anything about the Fremont ordinance?
Ms. O'BRIEN: Not really. No, I'm sorry.
(Soundbite of laughter)
Mr. CLAY SWANSON: Clay Swanson, I'm from Arlington, Iowa.
MASTERS: Do you care?
Mr. SWANSON: I didn't really care. Like, I love these bands, loved them since I was a little kid. And I saw Conor Oberst on the news, and he said a thing that really rang true. I thought being an immigrant is the most American thing that you can do - because it is.
MASTERS: The band that most of the people came to see was Oberst's sociopolitical punk group Desaparacidos, which hadn't performed together for eight years.
(Soundbite of song, "Greater Omaha")
DESAPARACIDOS (Music Group): (Singing) Well, traffic's kind of bad. They're widening Easy Street to fit more SUVs. They're planting baby trees to grow to shady peaks. A little shelter from the sun...
MASTERS: During the band's last song of the night, Oberst made clear his position on the Fremont ordinance, and even the most oblivious fans cheered him on.
Mr. OBERST: We're one people, we are one nation, and we are not letting these bigoted, crazy maniacs take our country from us, all right? So you're with me?
(Soundbite of cheering)
MASTERS: And for a moment, at least, they joined him in his outrage. As for the new Bright Eyes album, there are no overt political messages but rather, a general theme of acceptance and unity.
(Soundbite of song, "Shell Games")
BRIGHT EYES (Music Group): (Singing) Someone gotta share in the load. Oh, here it come that heavy love, I'm never gonna move it alone.
MASTERS: For NPR News, I'm Clay Masters
SIEGEL: Bright Eyes has a new album coming out next week, and you can hear it in its entirety at nprmusic.org.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
They are part Spanish bullfight, part Roman circus. On the northern coast of Colombia, it's the season of bull festivals called Corralejas. Fans come looking for rousing action, and they are rarely disappointed. Bulls are released into vast rings filled with young men. Participants are gored and sometimes even killed.
Nonetheless, as NPR's Juan Forero reports, Corralejas are embedded in the culture.
JUAN FORERO: At 2 p.m. sharp, thousands fill the rickety, wooden stands here in Sincelejo, the hottest part of the day in this honky-tonk town.
(Soundbite of trumpet)
FORERO: When the brass bands begin to warm up, it's a signal. Everyone knows the action is about to begin.
(Soundbite of music)
FORERO: Suddenly, a 900-pound bull charges into the ring, scattering hundreds of men.
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
(Soundbite of applause)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: Jose Antonio Gomez(ph) of RCN Radio narrates the action.
Mr. JOSE ANTONIO GOMEZ (RCN Radio): (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: What an outsider sees is sheer chaos. Men taunt the bull with capes. Others wield sticks. Still, others try to rope it. Twenty horsemen also chase after the bull, stabbing it with long wooden pikes. The bull fights back, sometimes killing horses.
The bull is quickly spent, bleeding, exhausted. It's lassoed and led out. Some bulls die; others live to fight another day. Some of the men also leave the arena quite battered.
Mr. JORGE LUIS VILLEGAS: (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: That's Jorge Luis Villegas describing how he's been gored six times, broken his rib and collarbone. On this day, he's back for more, along with his cape.
Mr. VILLEGAS: (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: Bullfighting, he says, means money and no bosses. The money comes directly from the stands, from the wealthy cattlemen who come ready to give cash to those below.
Some of the bravest walk away with a few hundred dollars after the weeklong festival.
The spectacle reflects the rigid hierarchy of rural Colombia: the rich enjoying themselves in the stands; the poor risking their lives.
But Inis Amador defends the rituals. He's a lawyer and historian who helped revive the Corralejas after a rough patch in the '80s.
Mr. INIS AMADOR (Lawyer and Historian): (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: He says the rituals were begun by the workers, the farmhands, even the slaves. They took time off from backbreaking work by putting together makeshift bullfights.
There's not much difference between then and now.
(Soundbite of cheering)
FORERO: Among those here is Carlos Cumplido Oviedo. He's a cattleman, and 20 of his bulls fight on this day.
Mr. CARLOS CUMPLIDO OVIEDO (Cattleman): (Foreign language spoken)
FORERO: What he wants is to breed ferocious bulls, he says, and to see the matadors fight them off.
By day's end, 40 bulls had come and gone, lots of alcohol had been consumed, and organizers tallied up the wounded from the week's festivities: Nine people gored. Two so seriously, they were hospitalized. But no fatalities, not this time around.
Unidentified Man #2: Ole.
FORERO: Juan Forero, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
We've been exploring what we're calling the fractured culture. With so many TV channels and the breadth of the Internet, what is popular with one group can go unnoticed by another. Today, video games. Gamers are not a unified group. Some are "Spider Solitaire" addicts. Others love "Resident Evil."
Heather Chaplin reports on one of the biggest and most intense video game subcultures.
HEATHER CHAPLIN: The "Final Fantasy" series has sold 97 million copies around the world, but if you don't play it, you probably haven't heard of it.
On a recent Tuesday, members of the NYU game club were hanging out, playing the latest installment in the 23-year-old franchise.
Mr. RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: Now, we're facing some sort of robot thing that is blocking our path in order to get to - where are we going to? Who are we meeting right now?
CHAPLIN: That's Richard Rodriguez. He graduated from NYU last year, but he still gets together to play video games with his friends from the club, like Zeke Abuhoff.
Mr. ZEKE ABUHOFF: One thing that's consistent across the series is an epic scale and operatic style to it.
CHAPLIN: As Rodriguez explains it, "Final Fantasy" is a role-playing game or RPG, with origins in pen and paper games like "Dungeons and Dragons."
(Soundbite of video game)
Unidentified Woman: This will be fun.
CHAPLIN: RPGs are all about heroic quests through richly drawn fantasy lands.
(Soundbite of video game)
CHAPLIN: Aesthetically, however, "Final Fantasy XIII" is a long way off from "Dungeons and Dragons."
Rodriguez describes it as lots of metal and robots in a Victorian city.
The main character in "Final Fantasy XIII" is Lightning, a pink-haired sword-wielding young woman out to save her sister who's in danger of losing her soul forever. Beyond that, the plot is too intricate to even begin to explain.
Mr. FRANK LANTZ (Director, NYU Game Center): There's an element of world building there.
CHAPLIN: Frank Lantz is director of the NYU game center.
Mr. LANTZ: In the same way that you can disappear into "Star Wars" or disappear into Tolkien's universe, and it really rewards that kind of archaeological excavation, where I'm just going to, like, go deeper and deeper into this piece of culture.
CHAPLIN: Frank Lantz says the complexity of the game can discourage all but the most persistent.
Mr. LANTZ: So cool and seductive, the idea that there is this cryptic, mysterious, confusing thing that you have no idea. You're looking at it, and you know that there's something going on there, and you don't know what it is. And if you make the effort, you get to unlock that secret.
CHAPLIN: But then, Richard Rodriguez is worried that the secret is being given away. New technologies like the Nintendo Wii motion control make it easier for anyone to play. You don't have to master a complicated set of buttons and joysticks.
Mr. RODRIGUEZ: I personally liked that my mom didn't understand what buttons to press and how she couldn't play the games that I was doing. It was something that was unique to my personality, and it was something that I enjoy doing that other people couldn't.
CHAPLIN: Then again, 67 million American households already play some kind of video game or another, so the days of games as a closed club may very well be over.
For NPR News, I'm Heather Chaplin.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Cell phones, computers and many other must-have items are made using rare earth minerals, and the business of those minerals has mostly been centered in China. But that is changing now that China has cutback on rare earth exports.
As NPR's Ina Jaffe reports, that has given a California company a reason to open up an old mine and a chance to make a profit.
INA JAFFE: Approaching the rim of rare Earth pit mine in the California desert, you expect to something, well, rare.
(Soundbite of footsteps)
Mr. SCOTT HONAN (Environmental Manager, Molycorp Minerals): Don't venture out over the edge.
JAFFE: But Scott Honan, the mine's environmental manager, points to a wall of rock as boringly brown as the vast desert around it. Still it's thrilling to him.
Mr. HONAN: Over the course of the next few weeks, we'll start mining this whole western wall of our open pit. And I, like a lot of my co-workers here, have been waiting for this for a long time.
JAFFE: Because nothing has been mined here for nearly a decade. The property known as Mountain Pass was owned by oil companies most recently Chevron. But after 50 years of operation, it was no longer cost effective to compete with the Chinese. There were also permit problems and environmental issues.
Mr. MARK SMITH (CEO, Molycorp Minerals): It was probably a good thing that we were shut down and we could reevaluate the first 50 years of our business.
JAFFE: Says Mark Smith, the CEO of Molycorp Minerals, which bought the mine in 2008.
Mr. SMITH: Take a look at the strengths that we had, the weaknesses, try to re-strategize how we wanted to run this business and get it back on its feet.
JAFFE: Smith says that the first thing they decided was that when the mine re-opened someday, they wanted to run a cleaner operation.
Mining rare earths is the easy part. But the 17 elements that comprise rare earths are naturally found mixed all together. Smith says that the usual method for separating them requires a witch's brew of chemicals.
Mr. SMITH: Sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, sodium hydroxide, sodium bicarbonate, ammonia...
JAFFE: These chemicals used to be trucked up to Mountain Pass in as many as 20 tankers a day. And the byproduct of the separation process was saltwater, 850 gallons a minute piped into evaporation ponds.
Now Molycorp has invented a method of taking that saltwater and reprocessing it back into the two main chemicals they use to separate the rare earth. It will make the production cleaner and a lot cheaper.
Mr. HONAN: In this particular circuit, we're separating the elements neodymium and praseodymium from lanthanum and cerium.
JAFFE: Scott Honan says they're getting the kinks out of the new process while a new plant is being built.
Mr. HONIN: So when we build the big plant, we'll have, you know, an experienced group of operators, and we'll have a really good understanding of the technology so that it will run very smoothly.
JAFFE: Molycorp plans to open the new plant in 2012. They expect to produce as much as 40,000 tons a year. And that can't happen soon enough to suit Congressman Mike Coffman, a Republican from Colorado.
He's concerned about national security. Rare earths, he explains, are used in a lot of military equipment.
Representative MIKE COFFMAN (Republican, Colorado): Everything from night-vision goggles to fighter aircraft to precision-guided munitions.
JAFFE: So Coffman is drafting legislation that he says will support the mining, processing and stockpiling of rare earths in the United States.
Rep. COFFMAN: In case we have an extreme shortage of these metals to where we're not able to produce the kind of weapons systems that we need for national security that are reliant upon these metals.
JAFFE: Like the congressman, Ed Richardson has also pushed the government to stop depending on China for rare earths. He's vice president of a company that makes magnets with military applications, and he says that the United States is in a global competition for rare earth minerals.
Mr. ED RICHARDSON (President, Thomas & Skinner, Inc.): The gap in terms of the world demand outside of what China has said they will export is in the order of about 100,000 tons.
JAFFE: And Richardson adds that as China's industry grows, its exports of rare earths will continue to shrink.
Mr. RICHARDSON: They're going to use all the rare earths they mine and then some. So, many in the industry think that that they will eventually not export at all, that they will eventually import rare earths.
JAFFE: Meaning that one day, China might not be Molycorp's competitor but one of its customers.
Ina Jaffe, NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
More coming up on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Well, not everyone in the fragmented culture wants to maintain a closed club.
NPR's Zoe Chace has this story about Christian teenagers who want to reach out using popular music in what they call human videos.
ZOE CHACE: Picture a massive arena. National Hockey League size. Filled with about 10,000 kids screaming. A group of nine boys marches onto a bare stage.
(Soundbite of song, "Our God Reigns")
Unidentified Man: (Singing) Our God reigns.
CHACE: They perform a wordless skit to the music. The kids form trees, mountains, a crucifix. It's called a human video because it's like a music video with only people as a set. The Assembly of God teenagers watching shriek with anticipation as an unmistakable Jesus is crucified.
(Soundbite of song, "Our God Reigns")
Mr. DANIEL ABOAGYE: Going to nationals is an amazing experience.
CHACE: Sixteen-year-old Daniel Aboagye.
Mr. ABOAGYE: Just having so many other teens around you who are on fire for Christ, and you just don't feel alone anymore. Because like, you know, being in school sometimes, you feel like you're the only person that cares.
CHACE: A little context before we dive in. The Assembly of God is an evangelical Pentecostal denomination. Every year, the church puts on a national arts festival. It's like an enormous talent show. About 60,000 Assembly of God kids try to make it to nationals. Categories range from photography to percussion to human video.
Mr. ABOAGYE: Well, the point isn't to go to competitions and win - it's nice.
CHACE: Here's what's different about this arts festival: the motivation behind it.
Mr. ABOAGYE: The point is that they're supposed to be ministry tools. They're supposed to be things you can go out and share the Gospel with people. When we get it just right, you know, it doesn't happen often, but when it does, when we get it just right, it's - I think it's the most powerful tool we have to minister to people is to show them.
CHACE: Daniel Aboagye's human video group is one of thousands meeting across the country right now to rehearse. His church is called Christ Chapel. It's in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a suburban shopping center.
Ms. ALICE JACKSON: Heavenly Father, God, I thank you for another evening.
CHACE: The church classroom is bare, except for the soda machine and a large poster of Jesus. It's dark outside, and the kids are giggly as they form a large circle.
Ms. JACKSON: In your holy precious name, I pray. Amen.
Unidentified Group: Amen.
Ms. JACKSON: All right. We got to pick a song. Anybody have anything they've been rolling around their mind, any song?
CHACE: Human video coach Alice Jackson turns to Daniel.
Mr. ABOAGYE: Okay, guys.
CHACE: Daniel brandishes his iPad. A gawky, skinny kid, alternately music nerd and passionate football coach, he's charismatic in the way that experts can be. Daniel and his coach run through at least a dozen songs.
(Soundbite of music)
Mr. ABOAGYE: And this has a really good moment where I think we could do a crucifixion scene.
CHACE: Some human videos are biblical stories. But even more are supposed to be current and go along these lines: A teenager contemplates suicide or an abortion or a school shooting or too much partying.
Ms. JACKSON: Giving in to whatever's surrounding him, be it smoking or drinking or whatever, and having this inner struggle.
CHACE: A kid playing Jesus usually steps in at the close of a human video and shows the protagonist how to make a change.
The kids vote on a song.
Unidentified Woman #1: This one, I vote for it.
Unidentified Woman #2: I love it.
Unidentified Woman #3: All who agree say aye.
Unidentified Woman #1: Aye.
Unidentified Woman #4: But I also like the other one.
CHACE: These kids seem like they're having a ton of fun playing around late on a Sunday night in the back room of their church.
But human videos are supposed to be a tool for proselytizing, and it can be hard to get up the nerve to reach out, says Alice Jackson.
Ms. JACKSON: In our backyard here at this church is Potomac Mills mall. People travel from everywhere to go to the mall, and I just - I would love to walk up in the middle of that food court, set up a sound system and be like, hey, here we are and minister to that crowd.
CHACE: What's holding you back, do you think, honestly?
Ms. JACKSON: What's holding me back? Fear. And that's actually a general theme that you'll see a lot in the human videos is fear because there's so many things in life we won't do. You know, some of the kids won't talk to their friends and tell them they're Christians, because they're afraid. They're afraid of rejection.
CHACE: But 14-year-old Brianna Thomas thinks if they're going to reach people at the mall, human videos would be the best way to do it.
Ms. BRIANNA THOMAS: You can't just like go up to a person and be like, hey, have you heard about Jesus lately? It's kind of like an awkward thing.
CHACE: Brianna is in the improv group at her public school. She says she feels human videos allow her to take something that can be difficult, proselytizing, and make it as fun as improv is.
Ms. THOMAS: Human videos are unique and different. And for me, that works because it's like something that I can have fun with and something like I can still have for my Christian self and go out and tell people about Jesus without the whole awkwardness of it.
CHACE: She hopes that just as human videos have reconciled two sides in her life, her school and her church, they can bridge a gap for others.
Zoe Chace, NPR News.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, to new technology in our cars. In 2009, over 30,000 Americans were killed in crashes. Most of those accidents were the result of driver error.
And now, as Brett Neely reports, the auto industry wants to cut down on traffic deaths using some commonplace technology.
BRETT NEELY: The car industry calls it vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology. This isn't exactly a new idea. This General Motors film from the 1939 World's Fair imagines a technology similar to what's finally making it onto roads today.
(Soundbite of film)
Unidentified Man: And now we see an enlarged section of 1960s express motorway. Safe distance between cars is maintained by automatic radio control.
NEELY: OK. So, they were off by a few decades, but they had the basic idea right, which is that most crashes are avoidable if drivers have enough time to react. To find out more, I went to an empty parking lot in Washington, D.C. and hopped in a car with Ford Motor Company engineer Joe Stinnett. We're following two other cars closely - too closely. It's the kind of scenario that often leads to those 60-car pileups you see on TV from time to time.
Mr. JOE STINNETT (Engineer, Ford Motor Company): So, we're just going to drive down to the end of the track here. At the end of the track, the lead vehicle is going to hit the brakes. So, you can imagine if this was a foggy or snowy day with limited visibility, this could be even worse.
NEELY: All three cars are equipped with a small GPS and Wi-Fi unit, just like inside a smartphone.
Ford is investing heavily in the technology and plans to launch a fleet of prototypes equipped with it this spring. It's pretty cheap, maybe $100 per car. And it lets the cars communicate things like latitude, longitude and speed with one another at a range of about 1,500 feet.
Mr. STINNETT: They're monitoring the positions of all the vehicles around you and trying to determine who is an immediate threat to your vehicle and what type of threat that vehicle is.
NEELY: If it looks like other cars are a threat, like the ones we're following too closely, this is what happens.
(Soundbite of beeping)
Mr. STINNETT: (Unintelligible) hit the brakes.
So, basically what you saw was you saw the lead vehicle brake lights go off and then you immediately saw the alert go off in this car, even before you had this vehicle ahead of you, before you saw their brake lights. So you get that advanced alert.
NEELY: Ford is working with most of the world's other major carmakers to turn this technology into a basic safety feature of every car. This vehicle-to-vehicle communications technology will be most effective if pretty much every car on the road is equipped with it.
University of Michigan safety expert, James Sayer, says giving drivers a few extra seconds of warning before a crash could dramatically reduce traffic accidents.
Professor JAMES SAYER (Safety Expert, University of Michigan): It still is the case that the weakest link is the driver, you know. The vast majority of errors in driving that lead to crashes are because of the driver. It's rarely the case that the wheel falls off.
NEELY: There is one concern about this technology that the auto industry is very sensitive to: privacy. After all, cars could soon be telling every other nearby car - and who knows who else - location, speed and where it's been in the past five minutes. Ford and other companies are trying to make that data as anonymous as possible.
Again, here's James Sayer.
Prof. SAYER: The fact that we walk around the streets with smartphones all the time means that, essentially, phone companies can track where we are if they wanted to. So I think there's lessening concern on the part of the public about the privacy.
NEELY: Limited trials will start later this year. If they're a success, the government could mandate that all cars be equipped with these devices before the decade is out.
For NPR News, I'm Brett Neely in Washington.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This is NPR.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
A federal judge in Pensacola, Florida, has ruled that the health care overhaul law is unconstitutional. The judge said that requiring people to buy health insurance goes beyond the powers given to Congress by the Constitution. And he took that issue one step further than most people had expected. He said the entire law is invalid.
With us now to explain what this means is NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner. First of all, Julie, exactly what did the judge in this case decide?
JULIE ROVNER: Well, Federal District Court Judge Roger Vinson actually had two issues before him: first, whether the requirements that states expand the Medicaid program for the poor are coercive; and second whether the mandate to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.
Now, he actually rejected the Medicaid claim, threw that out, which ironically is the one that the 26 states we keep hearing so much about were suing over.
The states actually tried to sue on the second part, that mandate to buy insurance, but all but two of them got kicked out of that. The remaining plaintiffs, which were two individuals and the National Federation of Independent Business, stayed in, and they ultimately prevailed, successfully arguing that the mandate is indeed unconstitutional.
NORRIS: But he didn't stop with the insurance mandate. He said the entire law must be declared invalid. What was his reasoning there?
ROVNER: Well, this is the part that's raising a lot of eyebrows. This is the fourth case so far that's reached this point. Two district court judges have found the law is constitutional. And the one other judge who said the individual requirement is not constitutional just said that part should be eliminated, that the rest of the law should be allowed to proceed without it.
That's what's known in legal jargon as severability. And the general rule for judges is that when they find a part of a law unconstitutional, they're supposed to preserve as much of the rest of the law as they can.
Now, Judge Vinson acknowledged that in his decision. Then he went on in several pages to say he thought Congress would rather have no law than a law without this individual requirement. In fact he wrote, and I quote: "The individual mandate and the remaining provisions are all inextricably bound together in purposes and must stand or fall as a single unit." And in that case he decided they all must fall.
NORRIS: So Julie, what happens now?
ROVNER: Well, that's not entirely clear. The Justice department will appeal the case, as it's appealing the other decision against the law in Virginia. And the judge didn't issue an injunction that would clearly block implementation.
So it's not certain what this decision means for implementation of the law going forward. The Justice Department did issue a statement saying it's looking at all of its options, including asking for a stay of the ruling while the case is on appeal.
Meanwhile, the next step for all of these cases obviously are appeals courts and, likely, eventually, the Supreme Court, which will make the ultimate ruling about the constitutionality of this.
NORRIS: One last, quick question, Julie: Is there any question about the politics of the judge in this case, as there was in Virginia?
ROVNER: Well, there was some question about this case, that there was some forum-shopping by the people who were opposed to this. They did go to a place where they thought the judge would be on their side, and, indeed, this judge was.
NORRIS: Thank you, Julie.
ROVNER: You're welcome, Michele.
NORRIS: That's NPR health policy correspondent Julie Rovner.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
It may be the beginning of the end for the Mubarak regime. Egypt's newly appointed vice president appeared on state television today. He said President Hosni Mubarak asked him to immediately begin dialogue with what he called political forces. Dialogue about reform. At the same time, demonstrators are calling for a march of one million people tomorrow.
NPR's Lourdes Garcia-Navarro reports from Cairo.
(Soundbite of protest)
Unidentified Man #1: (Foreign language spoken)
LOURDES GARCIA-NAVARRO: For a 7th night, the curfew here was broken by protestors in Tahrir Square. A man reads the names of the new Cabinet ministers appointed by Hosni Mubarak, to cries of enough, enough, from the crowd. The much hated interior minister has been replaced. But there are still many of the same old faces in the government. The protestors say it's too little too late. They want the whole government and its leader gone.
The air in the square for the past few days has been almost festive. This is a deliberately peaceful protest holding placards and chanting, camping out in tents. The protestors say they don't want to give the regime any chance to discredit them. The crowd today was also more diverse.
(Soundbite of protest)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: The sea of men were protesting by praying. The Muslim Brotherhood putting in a prominent appearance. The banned Islamist movement says it supports the goals of free and fair elections. They say they are throwing their weight behind Nobel laureate and opposition figure, Mohamed ElBaradei. But there were also Coptic Christians and the young urban protestors that kick started this movement. In another sign that these disparate groups are starting to organize, a media center has been set up.
Mr. AHMED ABDULLAH (Filmmaker): My name is Ahmed Abdullah. I'm a filmmaker.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: They are collecting footage from the protests to send out to the world via live streaming. While the government has cut Internet services in the country, the tech savvy here have found ways around the block.
Mr. ABDULLAH: People are supposed to know what's happened, even us, even for our own history, we're supposed to know what really happened.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tomorrow, calls have gone out for a massive protest to keep the pressure on the regime. In a statement, the army said that it considers the people's demands legitimate, and that it will not use force against the protestors. But that doesn't mean there isn't a risk of violence, says Elijah Zarwan, who works for the International Crisis Group.
Mr. ELIJAH ZARWAN (Senior Analyst, International Crisis Group): Tomorrow is likely to be another of the decisive days in the history of the revolt. There have been calls for a million man march, a general strike. And I suspect that the announcement that the new government today, in which very few faces changed, will contribute to the crowds. There's a possibility of further unrests, particularly now that the police are back on the streets.
(Soundbite of radio)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: As night fell and the streets emptied in residential areas, this local neighborhood watch group brandishing sticks paired with a few policemen checking cars and IDs. Gamil Khatab(ph) - one of the neighborhood watch volunteers - says things for now are quiet.
Mr. GAMIL KHATAB: (Through translator) There is security here. The police are in their locations. There are no problems. We will stand strong to protect the neighborhood.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But that isn't the case everywhere. Looting still continues. In Cairo, soldiers detained about 50 men trying to break into the Egyptian National Museum, according to reports. Egypt has turned upside down in this former police state. Now some in the security services are expected of being behind the crime wave.
Mr. PETER BOUCKAERT (Human Rights Watch): It's quite clear to us that this is an organized attempt by the Mubarak government and his interior ministry to create chaos and instability in the country.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Peter Bouckaert is with the New York based Human Rights Watch. He says Human Rights Watch had documented cases, what looters were caught and they were carrying IDs of the undercover police.
Mr. BOUCKAERT: The Mubarak government is basically trying to give people a choice. His mantra has always been he's the guarantor of the security of the people and the stability of the state. So, no Mubarak means no stability and no security.
(Soundbite of protest)
GARCIA-NAVARRO: But back in the square, the protestors appeared undaunted, preparing for another massive demonstration in an attempt to topple Mubarak's regime.
Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, NPR News, Cairo.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
So, we're hearing of plans not only to continue the protests in Egypt, but also to create a more defined leadership for the movement, which may not be so simple. From Mohamed ElBaradei to young students to long-time members of the Muslim Brotherhood, we are seeing a wide range of Egyptian society out on the streets.
And joining us to talk more about that is Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution. He's a former CIA officer who has advised several presidents on issues in the Middle East. Welcome to the program once again.
Mr. BRUCE RIEDEL (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): Thank you very much for having me.
SIEGEL: And, first, let's talk about the Muslim Brotherhood. It is officially banned in Egypt and it's one of the longest lasting and best organized groups to oppose the regime. But it hasn't appeared to be a big player in this protest. Is that a measure of its importance? Or is is a tactical low profile:
Mr. RIEDEL: Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest and the strongest and the best organized opposition group in Egypt. But it also knows that it has been used by the Mubarak regime for 30 years to demonize the opposition and to paint it as Islamic terrorists.
So I think the Muslim Brotherhood in this current round of unrest has played it very cleverly, letting others be out front even as it helps to organize these demonstrations. I think what we saw at the end of last week, particularly on Friday, is that when the Muslim Brotherhood does give the instructions to get people out, you see much, much larger crowd than you had up until that moment.
In any future Democratic government in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is going to play an important role. We shouldn't be terrified by that, but we should be aware that that's going to be the outcome.
SIEGEL: Do you believe that the Muslim Brotherhood, in fact, would be committed to a Democratic system in which it might at some point gain power but at a later point lose power?
Mr. RIEDEL: You know, the honest truth is that no one knows how the Muslim Brotherhood will behave if the dynamics of the situation aren't changed. This has been a party that's been in opposition under severe repression for half a century since Egypt had its revolution in 1952. But what we have seen over the last 20 years or so is a party that has shooed violent, has agreed to play by the rules and has said that it's not interested in trying to impose its narrow view of Islam on the entire society.
But rather, trying to make sure that Egypt moves in the direction of Islamic politics. It's tried to paint itself much as the ruling party in Turkey has behaved in the last several years.
SIEGEL: What do you make of this enormous alliance out in the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities? Are there obvious issues that divide the generations in Egypt, say, between these young people in their early 20s and older people whom we see taking part?
Mr. RIEDEL: Well, what you have seen in Egypt and what you saw before that in Tunisia is an earthquake in the Arab world. We have never the Arab street topple a dictator. That happened first in Tunis and it increasingly looks like it's going to happen in Cairo. The alliance that has done that is across the board. But at the heart of it are angry young men unemployed or underemployed with very little prospect of a stable, serious job in their future.
One of the biggest challenges here, of course, is going to be the day after. How does the new Egyptian government actually get employment for all of those people? How do they make the economic system work so that those people now really have a stake in society?
No one has any really good answers to those. So, assuming we do transition to more Democratic regimes, they're going to face enormous challenges trying to address the socioeconomic problems that brought them into power in the first place.
SIEGEL: How do you see Mohamed ElBaradei in all of this? Is he simply a symbol of the nation who is - around whom people can gather momentarily or is he an enduring figure, do you think, in the next chapter of Egypt's life?
Mr. RIEDEL: Mohamed ElBaradei could be a very important figure here. We need a figure who can be a transitional leader that's not tainted by association with the Mubarak era and who a wide spectrum of the Egyptian opposition is at least willing to trust to be their titular leader.
Mohamed ElBaradei also is a voice that the West knows, that the international community knows. He can provide that transition, that stabilizing element through what is going to be a very confusing time.
SIEGEL: Mr. Riedel, thank you very much for talking with us.
Mr. RIEDEL: My pleasure.
SIEGEL: That's Bruce Riedel, who is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
And we begin All Tech Considered today, looking at communication in Egypt.
Late last week, the Egyptian government shut down almost all Internet access in the country as it tried to slow the growing protest movement. And while online traffic in Egypt slowed to a crawl, it has not stopped entirely. Egyptians have come up with some creative ways to get online and to get their messages out.
For more on this, I'm joined by Danny O'Brien. He's Internet advocacy coordinator for the Community to Protect Journalists and he's based in San Francisco. Mr. O'Brien, thanks for being with us.
Mr. DANNY O'BRIEN (Internet Advocacy Coordinator, Community to Protect Journalists): Thank you.
NORRIS: I want to start with how this was done. I'm curious about this. Is there some big red switch somewhere that the Egyptian government flipped and it instantly turned off the Internet?
Mr. O'BRIEN: Well, it certainly looked that way. I was actually online with some contacts in communication with people in Egypt, and we watched Egypt disappear off the net pretty much instantaneously. I think in order to do that on an Internet infrastructure that has a lot of different working parts in it, a lot of different people would have to turn off their systems pretty much at the same time to make that effective.
NORRIS: So, how would you do that?
Mr. O'BRIEN: Well, the way the Internet works is that scattered right across the network are a bunch of machines that have, as it were, a sort of index to all the destinations that a packet of data can go to. And what the majority of Egypt's Internet service providers did was simply withdraw their entries in that index simultaneously. So, suddenly, for all intents and purposes in the rest of the world, Egypt just stopped existing on the Internet.
NORRIS: But that didn't stop the messages coming out of Egypt. People were still figuring out how to get messages out. How were they able to find back doors?
Mr. O'BRIEN: Well, it's not been very long since we left the dial-up age. And for a lot of Egyptians right now, they dug out their old modems and they started to connect to dialing old style ISP phone numbers. And people started offering around the world. So essentially people are calling out to places like Italy, the United States, United Kingdom so that they can connect to the Internet there.
NORRIS: Have there been similar shutdowns of the Internet in other countries -China, Iran, elsewhere?
Mr. O'BRIEN: There have been shutdowns of countries where they've disappeared like this. Usually, it's either been an accident, a cable snapped. Or in the case of Burma, Burma did disappear off the net. But that was in 2007. And Burma at the time was certainly not as well connected and as much of an economic powerhouse as Egypt.
I think the really significant thing here is that Egypt was a very strongly connected country with a great deal of economic interest in keeping the Internet up. Other countries like Iran and China really have not gone this far because of the damaging ramifications to the rest of their economy.
NORRIS: You know, beyond people digging out their modems, I'm wondering if there was a wholesale turn or a greater interest suddenly in old technology, people using ham radios or things like that.
Mr. O'BRIEN: Yes, there was. I think this is largely from the outside world wanting to help. Ham radio has always been a fallback system in the event of natural disasters and many, many ham radio enthusiasts around the world came up to help and to offer yet another way of getting information out of the country.
There's not a very large number of Egyptian ham radio operators. However, many of them were not surprisingly out in the streets rather than right on their radios.
NORRIS: Danny O'Brien, thank you very much.
Mr. O'BRIEN: Thank you.
NORRIS: Danny O'Brien is the Internet advocacy coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists. He spoke with us from San Francisco.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
From NPR News, this ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Robert Siegel.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
And I'm Michele Norris.
The United States evacuated 1,200 Americans from Egypt today, and the State Department says it will keep charter flights going as long as needed. Behind the scenes, the Obama administration is pressing Egypt to prepare for what American officials call an orderly transition to democracy.
As NPR's Michele Kelemen reports, the U.S. has carefully avoided calling for Hosni Mubarak to step aside.
MICHELE KELEMEN: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the U.S. is delivering a clear message to the Egyptian government that it should pursue constitutional changes and free and fair elections. But Gibbs says the U.S. can't decide who's on the ballot. And he repeatedly declined to answer whether Mubarak needs to leave his post.
Mr. ROBERT GIBBS (Press Secretary, White House): We're not picking between those on the street and those in the government.
KELEMEN: That's an understandable position, says Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Dr. MICHELE DUNNE (Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace): They sort of don't want to have their fingerprints all over this.
KELEMEN: But she still fears the U.S. is behind the curve in Egypt.
Dr. DUNNE: We're already seen as not having supported human rights and democracy for Egyptians. And we can do a lot more damage now by being seen as sheltering the Egyptian government from the demands of its own people at this point.
KELEMEN: Dunne says the U.S. should be encouraging the Egyptian government to negotiate with the protestors in order to agree on a path toward democracy. And she says much will depend on what the military does.
Since the U.S. is a major donor to Egypt's army, Tarek Masoud of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government thinks it's time to play that card.
Professor TAREK MASOUD (Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School): We should use every iota of our leverage to ensure that the military follows through the democratic process, and that does include playing the aid card. This is the time to do it.
KELEMEN: But James Zogby of the Arab-American Institute warns against threatening to pull U.S. aid, saying this is no time to alienate the Egyptian military. He says the U.S. should remain behind the curve - cautious and hands-off.
Dr. JAMES ZOGBY (President, Arab American Institute): Are we the guys to sprinkle holy water on whatever comes out of this? And I think the answer is not.
KELEMEN: Regardless of what happens with Mubarak or other U.S. allies in the region, the Obama administration will face a different Middle East, Zogby says. Leaders will have to be more attuned to public opinion in a part of the world where, he says, U.S. policies are unpopular.
Dr. ZOGBY: And so I think that you'll see less eagerness to support America, vis-a-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict. Or less eagerness to support the tough line on Iran, despite the fact that they themselves are nervous about Iran. We're not going to have as ready a field of supporters in the region willing to follow our lead, as we've had in the past.
KELEMEN: And he believes that will be the case, whether or not the U.S. publicly calls on Mubarak to step aside. There are other unknowns for the U.S. in Egypt, including the role of the Muslim Brotherhood. Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment plays done suggestions of an Islamist takeover of what has been up to now a leaderless revolution.
Dr. DUNNE: While the Islamists, primarily the Muslim Brotherhood, are an important factor in this situation and will be an important player in Egyptian politics in the future, there's no reason to believe that they're going to dominate the scene. They show no signs, for example, of being positioned to make a grab for power.
KELEMEN: Obama administration officials say they have no contact with the Muslim Brotherhood. And while the U.S. wants to promote a more open political system in Egypt, it also thinks that any group that wants to play a role should be committed to nonviolence. The U.S. influence in this process, though, is likely to be limited.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, Washington.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
One of the groups calling for a demonstration by a million Egyptians tomorrow is the April 6th Movement. It's a group of young Egyptians that takes its name from a national strike it called on that date in 2008 in support of a workers' strike the year before.
Sherif Mansour of the Washington-based NGO Freedom House is familiar with the April 6th Movement. He says it is an umbrella group centered on its Facebook page, and the movement encompasses young people of different political beliefs.
Mr. SHERIF MANSOUR (Senior Program Officer, Middle East North Africa Programs, Freedom House): I think the focus on having a liberal kind of agenda that's inclusive for everyone to participate - they promoted the idea of unity among political activists regardless of their background and affiliation. And that's why they were able to work with multiple political parties, including liberal, Nazareth and Muslim Brotherhood.
SIEGEL: From what I've seen, documents issued by the April 6th Movement setting out the group's demands, for example, do not begin with a traditional Islamic salutation: In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful. Does that surprise you or no?
Mr. MANSOUR: That was a neat thing back then. Because for so long, the mosque was the only space where Egyptians could actually associate because of the restrictions on public freedoms and freedom for association. And that's why this group was unique because it managed to build a grassroot connection with youth all over the country. And I think the equivalent to the mosque, in terms of providing social space, was the Internet.
SIEGEL: The Internet. To what extent was the April 6th Movement a public above-board group whose members could be identified? And to what extent was it something that you kept your membership secret, if you belonged to it?
Mr. MANSOUR: Most of the activities and members were public. The group was met with a lot of repression by the government. A lot of them were arrested, repeatedly beaten in the streets, so they had to be a little bit careful. But, at the same time, the group is very decentralized in their work. And they have a unique kind of structure where they have flat leadership, so that they can operate in all universities across the country without having a central command.
SIEGEL: But is there somebody who, if that leader stood up in Tahrir Square and said, here, I'm from, you know - you know me, I'm from the April 6th Movement, would hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of people know who that was and recognize him or her?
Mr. MANSOUR: There is. And one of the public images of that movement is Israa Abdel Fattah who is a young Egyptian girl who started the call for the strike in 2008. And she was put in prison for two weeks because of it. And the group started advocating for her release and it became a national kind of debate. So she got a lot of publicity and people knew her by name and know her face.
In addition, there is the current leader of the group who's Ahmed Maher, another young engineer. He's 30 years old and he's also one of the public faces of the movement. And he has been arrested more than once and tortured, even to stay away from the movement but he didn't.
SIEGEL: Mr. Mansour, thank you very much for talking with us.
Mr. MANSOUR: Thank you for having me.
SIEGEL: That's Sherif Mansour of the Washington-based NGO Freedom House.
And one other note of interest, Mr. Mansour pointed out that January 25th - the day the protests began - is Police Day in Egypt. It commemorates a British attack on an Egyptian police station in 1952, and it celebrates the resistance of the Egyptian police.
Well, last year, the April 6th Movement organized protests on January 25th against the police. And this year, even before demonstrations brought down the government in Tunisia, Egyptians planned to protest on that date again.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
In Egypt, the outlines of a possible solution to political stalemate are beginning to take shape. Today, on state television, Egypt's new vice president said that President Hosni Mubarak has authorized him to open a dialogue with the opposition.
Omar Suleiman is a crafty veteran of Middle East negotiating and the former head of military intelligence in Egypt.
NPR's Tom Gjelten reports on how the new vice president might lead Egypt out of its crisis.
TOM GJELTEN: Omar Suleiman is himself a general, and his political ally in the last week has been another long-time general, Hussein Tantawi, the defense minister.
Stephen Cohen, the president of the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development, has known both men for many years and talks to them regularly. He says Suleiman and Tantawi with the rest of the Egyptian military are now focused, above all, on the interests of the Egyptian state, not Hosni Mubarak.
Dr. STEPHEN COHEN (President, Institute for Middle East Peace and Development): They are not now concerned about maintaining Mubarak's power. They are very concerned about maintaining the legitimacy of the military among the people who are engaged in these demonstrations. They want to make sure that the structure of power in Egypt that keeps the state legitimate will not be damaged by what has happened.
GJELTEN: The role of the army in Egypt, Cohen says, is so central to the Egyptian state that if the people and the army are split, the state itself would lose its legitimacy. That could lead to chaos.
The bottom line here is that Mubarak seems to have lost the support of the Egyptian army. The military's high command today issued a statement saying it considered the demands of the street demonstrators to be, quote, "legitimate," unquote, and promising it would not use force against the people.
Meanwhile, Generals Suleiman and Tantawi have been working on a plan for a peaceful end to this popular uprising. Cohen says it involves two possible solutions. First, 100 members of the recently elected parliament would be replaced by a hundred new members from among candidates who were forced out of the last parliamentary election by government meddling. Beyond that, there could be new parliamentary and presidential elections. Cohen says Suleiman and Tantawi have been working on this plan in consultation both with the demonstrators and with Mubarak himself.
Dr. COHEN: They want to make sure that Mubarak is going to cooperate in giving up his presidency when they are ready to implement either of these two plans. And they are making sure that the hundred new members of parliament are people that would be approved by the demonstrators. And they are making sure that if there is a new election that would be an answer to the concerns of the people who have been engaging in the large demonstrations.
GJELTEN: And that, of course, is a big question. Would this proposal meet their demands? The demonstrators who took to the streets in Tunisia early this month were not satisfied with a simple change of leadership. They wanted much more sweeping change.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Tom Gjelten.
And, Tom, you're talking about negotiations. How can these generals negotiate with the demonstrators when the demonstrators don't appear to have a leader?
GJELTEN: It could actually make things easier, Robert. If there were a leader, he or she might demand the presidency as a prize for calling off the protests. There is no one in a position to do that. If a proposal like this were implemented, it could take enough energy out of the protests to bring the crisis to an end.
SIEGEL: Any indication of what the U.S. government would think of this proposal?
GJELTEN: They're being very careful not to say, Robert, but the U.S. interest is stability, stability in the region, stability in Egypt. There are few countries in the world more key to U.S. strategic interests than Egypt. And I think we could probably assume that if this proposal were to go forward, it would be welcomed by the Obama administration.
SIEGEL: Okay. Thank you, Tom.
GJELTEN: Thank you, Robert.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Tom Gjelten.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
We turn now to the coastal city of Alexandria, the scene of some of the most violent clashes since the protests began. Souad Mekhennet is a special correspondent for The New York Times, and she's been covering the unrest in Alexandria. She joins us now.
What's going on right now in Alexandria, and why have the protests in this city, in particular, turned so violent?
Ms. SOUAD MEKHENNET (Correspondent, The New York Times): Well, right now, Michele, we see thousands of people, mostly young people, here in the street in Alexandria. It's after curfew and it's already dark, but they are still protesting, and many of them are intending to spend the night here on the streets because they say that they have the feeling the president did not get the message, which is not to change the government but to step down.
NORRIS: Today, there have been reports of heavy machinegun fire. What's going on there?
Ms. MEKHENNET: Well, actually, what happened is that in some areas when - and we actually witnessed one of these situations - when a group of people in each neighborhood and they are marching and trying to keep the neighborhoods safe. These are young men with knives or sticks and trying to stop people when they have the feeling someone is a thief or someone is trying to create problems. So if this person doesn't stop and they call for the army, which is somewhere nearby, then the army starts basically shooting in the air.
NORRIS: There are reports of shortages of all kinds. There are reports that pregnant women are unable to get to hospitals, that there have been problems with waste collection. And Alexandria is also Egypt's largest port, and I guess containers and ships are now backing up there. Food prices have more than doubled. How have these continued protests started to affect everyday life in the city?
Ms. MEKHENNET: Actually, today is also the, you know, the day where most of the people were supposed to get their salaries, and all the banks are closed. People don't know how to get cash. So there's a shortage, actually, also in money. You know, schools are closed down. And as you mentioned, the prices have doubled. There is a shortage in gasoline. There are so many people now standing in front of bakeries to get bread.
And, you know, many people who are out there told us, we are aware of the fact that we will have to pay a price for this, and we are ready to eat even just twice a day and maybe even just eat beans and rice on -maybe even just a piece of bread, but still, we think it's worth it. We will march.
NORRIS: What's expected for Tuesday when protesters are calling for a march of a million?
Ms. MEKHENNET: Well, here in Alexandria, all the organizations have said that they called people from the neighboring cities, smaller cities, to come and march, and there are talks about the possibility of also sleeping on the street. So tomorrow, of course, it's going to be one of the most important days for all these - especially young people.
And by the way, there are also women out there. And what we've seen in Alexandria is that from day to day, there are more women marching with all these protesters.
NORRIS: In that culture, what does it mean that this many women have taken to the streets and have joined the protesters?
Ms. MEKHENNET: It actually does mean a lot. I mean, in the past, I myself, I interviewed many women who said, you know, we never took part in the demonstration. And all the organizations made very clear, they said this is a protest of all Egyptians - women and men - and everyone should have the right to walk and march.
You know, there's one thing actually that was very interesting which most of the protesters told us that they're very unhappy with the position of Western countries because they said, look, we have heard the speech of President Obama when he came to Cairo and he spoke about change and he spoke about starting a new chapter with the Arab world.
And they say, well, we want a change in our country, and this is why we are protesting. And now, the problem is that we have the feeling it's -the Obama administration and also some other Western countries who are basically backing Mubarak, who are not on our side. So they're very angry, and they have this feeling to mobilize more people so that their voice and their message should also be heard.
NORRIS: Souad Mekhennet, thank you very much for speaking with us.
Ms. MEKHENNET: You're welcome.
NORRIS: Souad Mekhennet is a special correspondent for The New York Times. We spoke to her from Alexandria.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now to the airport in Alexandria. Thousands of foreigners are trying to fly out of Egypt. Today, the U.S. evacuated hundreds of Americans on charter flights. And while the scene at Cairo International Airport has been chaotic, it is much quieter in Alexandria.
Even so, that doesn't mean that Carolyn Witte will get home as quickly as she would like. She's a 20-year-old Near Eastern studies major from Cornell, and she told us that she's been at the airport since noon yesterday with no end in sight.
Ms. CAROLYN WITTE (Student, Cornell University): We are supposedly boarding a flight to Prague, but I will believe it when I see a plane.
SIEGEL: How long were you in Alexandria, Egypt, which I gather is where you were studying, and what was it like there?
Ms. WITTE: I had been there three weeks as of Saturday. So the protests started not even a month into my abroad experience. So it's definitely still experiencing that the cultural shock, processing the idea that I was going to be here for the next five months, when the protests broke out.
SIEGEL: And was it exciting, scary, both, neither? What would you say?
Ms. WITTE: I would say it was an emotional roller coaster to say the least. At the beginning, it was very exciting. No one really thought that these protests were going to be a big deal.
I live with a bunch of Egyptian girls in the dorm at Alexandria University, and none of them thought anything of the protests. They all were much more worried about their exams. Even up to Thursday and Friday, no one thought that these protests were going to be anything serious or any change was really going to come from them.
But the excitement quickly turned into, you know, a little bit of fear. You know, I spent my last night, Friday night, in the only open dorm in the entire country, and it was very frightening, with gunshots out the windows, with turning the lights off, hiding, you know, on the floor with a bunch of girls with, you know, some old men outside with sticks trying to protect us against looters.
It definitely makes the situation seem a lot more real and definitely not so romanticized as, you know, a revolution you might read about.
SIEGEL: Well, now you're at the airport. What is the scene there, and how many people are in your situation trying to get out?
Ms. WITTE: Well, currently in this airport, we are the only people in this airport. It's closed. We've been here since yesterday morning. And when we got here, there were a good number of people, mostly from Saudi Arabia, I believe, but they quickly got on a flight to Dubai.
And then we were the only ones. I guess there were a few stragglers who spent the night in the airport. Then to this, midday today, we are moved to the there's two airports in Alexandria, moved to the old airport. I'm not quite sure why but then spent the day there and then went through security and then after getting cleared through security were moved back to the new airport about 10 minutes ago and are now waiting here for our flight. And there's no one else here but us.
SIEGEL: Well, you've had quite an interesting lesson in Near Eastern studies over the past few days.
Ms. WITTE: Absolutely. And I guess the biggest thing I would like to get across is that as, you know, difficult of a situation that this has been for us here and as sad as we are to leave Egypt, you know, so early into our semester abroad, we really are very excited for the Egyptian people. And that was incredibly inspiring to see.
SIEGEL: Well, Carolyn Witte, thank you very much for talking with us, and good luck. I hope you get your flight soon.
Ms. WITTE: Thank you so much.
SIEGEL: That's Carolyn Witte of Laguna Beach, California, who is a junior at Cornell and was hoping to spend the semester in Alexandria, in Egypt. She's now trying to fly home.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Russia's justice system drew international attention last month with a new conviction of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. He was once the country's most successful businessman. Critics called the trial of the former oil tycoon pure politics. They said it was intended to punish and silence a man who has prominently opposed the Kremlin.
But it's not just oligarchs who can suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of the court in Russia. NPR's David Greene has the story of another legal battle in Russia's deep south.
DAVID GREENE: The city of Astrakhan is in the part of Russia that looks out across the Caspian Sea towards Iran. There are a half million residents here, and people from Central Asia, Muslims, help create this rich diversity.
Unidentified Man: (Speaking foreign language)
GREENE: The fishing industry here has struggled, and people live in rickety wooden homes built a century ago.
(Soundbite of dog barking)
GREENE: The city is trying to modernize, but there may be a shadowy side of their plans. Residents whose homes are marked for demolition say theyre not getting the compensation that was promised them, and in some cases, if they resist moving, their homes are mysteriously catching fire.
Viktoriya Zagidulina is an out-of-work lawyer whose apartment building caught fire in 2006. Her unit was the only one salvaged. She's gone to court, determined to find out if the city, or perhaps developers working with them, are intentionally setting fires to make sure downtown is cleared for new development. There have been dozens of fires since 2006, and an unknown number of people have died, including two of Zagidulina's neighbors.
Ms. VIKTORIYA ZAGIDULINA: (Through translation) There was a fire, and a son was trying to save his mother. They both died, all in the name of a business plan. Each year it becomes worse and worse. They built this hierarchy of power. And trying to get justice in a Russian court is impossible.
GREENE: Zagidulina has paid a price for trying. She says she's been labeled as a troublemaker among the city's elite, and several men once attacked her boyfriend.
Meanwhile, she has spent several years tangled in a legal bureaucracy that has produced a lot of paper from prosecutors, judges, city officials, but really no answers.
Whatever the cause of these fires, battles like this are familiar across Russia. Courts are pressured to ignore accusations against the government. Journalists are intimidated, or worse, beaten or killed if they start asking questions.
Sergei Kutushev, Astrakhan's deputy mayor for legal affairs, says in his city at least, there's nothing to hide. The fires, he says, are mostly accidental or arsons carried out by other residents.
Deputy Mayor SERGEI KUTUSHEV (Astrakhan, Russia): (Through translation) We live in a democracy. And we love our citizens. The idea that we are trying to clear this land, it's ridiculous. The mayor and I are not running around the city with matches setting houses on fire.
GREENE: One of the homes that caught fire belongs to 47-year-old Olga Sidorenko. She was doing the laundry one night when flames appeared from all sides. Her wooden house was built before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and it survived everything including this fire, though just barely.
Ms. OLGA SIDORENKO: (Speaking foreign language).
GREENE: She's not ready to directly accuse local officials, but as she puts it, we were not the first ones and not the last ones. Fires are everywhere around here.
For several years, she's tried to get the police or prosecutors to look in to what happened. She's heard nothing.
Ms. SIDORENKO: (Soundbite of laughter).
GREENE: Sidorenko brought us into her home, a few rooms salvaged from the wreckage that she shares with her three children and elderly mother. There's cold coming in through the mangled roof. The walls are still charred.
This woman spends much of her time shivering in front of a small television set, which at this moment happens to be showing her president, Dmitri Medvedev, at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. He was telling other leaders that Russia must fight corruption and improve its legal system. Sidorenko pointed at the TV.
Ms. SIDORENKO: (Speaking foreign language).
GREENE: He talks so much, she said. Let him come here and look at my house.
David Greene, NPR News, Astrakhan, Russia
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Michele Norris.
ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
And I'm Robert Siegel.
Leaders across the Middle East are monitoring the situation in Egypt, and nowhere have the events been watched with more trepidation than in Israel.
Sheera Frenkel reports from Jerusalem.
SHEERA FRENKEL: Outside the ministries housing Israel's top officials, lights can be seen burning round the clock. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered his government to come up with contingency plans for every possible scenario that could emerge from the upheaval in Egypt.
The foreign ministry, defense ministry and the heads of the IDF are meeting every two hours, according to a government official who briefed reporters off the record.
Few are speaking publicly about the risk to Israel, should Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, be overthrown. Egypt is the cornerstone of Israel's diplomatic regional policies.
Mr. ZVI MAZEL (Former Ambassador to Egypt): Mubarak kept peace, maintained peace. He was a very balanced and stable man. When he changes, when we see the chaos in Egypt, we are afraid.
FRENKEL: That's Zvi Mazel, one of the Israeli officials with the most experience in Egypt. He helped set up the first diplomatic mission there in 1980 and served as an ambassador to Egypt from 1996 to 2001.
He recalls the early days. Israel's peace treaty with Egypt in 1979 returned the Sinai to Egypt on condition it remain demilitarized and was the first time in the history of the Jewish state that it gave back land. Through Egypt, said Mazel, Israel hoped to establish a New Middle East.
Mr. MAZEL: All of us, we were very optimist. We told ourselves, since Egypt took this very important decision to stop war with Israel and to begin a new era of diplomatic relations - I mean, after its transitional period, everything would be okay.
FRENKEL: He said that the uprising in Egypt left Israel facing the possible return to a situation pre-1979. If the Mubarak regime falls, Mazel said, the new government could choose to ignore the peace deals forged between Israel and Egypt.
Sheikh Fadel Hamdan is a Palestinian lawmaker from Hamas. He said that a more immediate threat to Israel would be for Egypt to change its policy on the Gaza Strip, or shift alliances in the Arab world.
Mr. SHEIKH FADEL HAMDAN (Palestinian Lawmaker): (Through translator) All the people in the Arab world are looking with great interest at the developments in Egypt. If things change in Egypt, this will have a positive impact on the whole Arab world, especially in Gaza.
FRENKEL: What Hamdan sees as a positive impact is the opening of crossings to Gaza that would allow people and goods to travel freely. Under Mubarak, Egypt assisted Israel in enforcing a strict blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today said in a statement that he was anxiously monitoring what is happening in Egypt. He added that Israel's efforts were aimed at maintaining stability and security.
Israeli newspapers report that the government has been quietly sending out messages to the United States and other Western countries that Mubarak should be supported at all costs. Netanyahu's office also confirmed that Israel was allowing the Egyptian military to deploy in the Sinai Peninsula for the first time since the two countries signed the 1979 Peace Treaty.
Zvi Mazel, the former ambassador to Egypt, said that Israel was doing everything in its power to de-escalate the situation.
Mr. MAZEL: We know now - we understand that trigger - the last trigger was Tunisia. But still, it was - it came very fast after Tunisia. We were surprised, absolutely.
FRENKEL: Israeli officials are now busy monitoring other countries, among them, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, to see if the revolutionary spirit spreads to its neighbors.
For NPR News, I'm Sheera Frenkel in Jerusalem.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
One news outlet has led all others in getting out word of developments from Egypt and that's the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera. Its past coverage has been controversial in this country due to a tone some American critics contend is anti-American or anti-Israel. And its English-language service has been kept off most cable systems here, but people steeped in the politics of the region say the work has been indispensible over the past week.
NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins us now from our bureau in New York to talk more about this.
David, why are people now saying Al-Jazeera's coverage is so important in this conflict?
DAVID FOLKENFLIK: Well, this is Al-Jazeera's sweet spot. It's where they live. They've been doing it for, one way or another, 15 years. Last week, they were there with live pictures and coverage at a time when Western outlets were caught a bit short. They were caught a bit short in terms of being there and also in understanding events as they were unfolding.
For example, President Mubarak has been a stalwart American ally. And so, in terms of positioning this, there's a little uncertainty to see it play out in the airwaves. An American journalist who was on CNN at one point, even rebuked an anchor, saying, look, change your caption. It says chaos in Egypt. You should change it to something like, uprising or revolution, saying that the idea of chaos was playing into the hands of the regime.
As well, in talking to analysts, they say that Al-Jazeera has been much more sophisticated than its American and Western counterparts. For example, when President Mubarak named his intelligence chief as the new vice president, the channel's pundits instantly knew that protesters would probably recoil, as that intelligence chief has been linked to various episodes of torture there.
I spoke earlier today to former State Department official named Katie Stanton. She's now vice president at Twitter. She says everyone, including government officials here in the States, are turning to Al-Jazeera as a trusted source of news, and that Al-Jazeera has used Twitter aggressively to get out its reports.
It helps to remember - I mean, you're talking about Jazeera's incredibly dramatic footage while a crackdown was in place. Think back last Friday, the authorities shut down the Internet, shut down cell phone traffic, and yet Al-Jazeera was still broadcasting to the outside world. It was perhaps most tangible and vivid in moments where you could hear reporters telling the anchors on Al-Jazeera English's feed that there were policemen at the door, trying to knock down the doors to shut down the coverage.
MSNBC, trying to play catch-up, was airing footage from Al-Jazeera itself.
NORRIS: So the revolution was televised.
FOLKENFLIK: Yeah. Exactly.
NORRIS: You know, part of the story here is that Al-Jazeera managed to stay on the air, even when there was an attempt to keep them off the air, that they were very wily in terms of continuing to report on the conflict.
FOLKENFLIK: I think that's exactly right. They were showing enterprise in a variety of ways, in part because they had people on the field, in part because they were using perhaps more mobile and portable ways to uplink things to satellite.
At one point, you had reporters, I'm told, call in to the social newsroom and sort of dictate their tweets so they could be sent out through social media networks.
NORRIS: So why can't we watch it on TV here in America, except in a very small number of cases?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, a ton of people have been watching online. That's a relative ton of people. We're told that the Al-Jazeera English website saw a 2,500 percent jump in online visitors last week, most of it, or much of it driven from the U.S. But that's a tiny percentage when you consider all the people who aren't able to see it on television. It's available in Washington area. It's available in places like Toledo, Ohio, Burlington, Vermont, you know...
NORRIS: Burlington, Vermont.
FOLKENFLIK: That's right. Little isolated areas. Burlington, known sort of a liberal enclave, they may be interested in a place that's known as being somewhat more critical of the United States stand, some critics say anti-American, some critics also say anti-Israel. There's that political touchiness around it. The cable providers say it's a business decision. Others say it's really politics.
But people have been hungry for this, at least over the past week. As Yogi Berra might say, everybody is watching, but nobody can see it, at least not on television.
NORRIS: Hmm. So Al-Jazeera has built up quite a bit of momentum with their coverage. What do they do with that?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, an Al-Jazeera official told me earlier today they plan to re-launch a campaign they began two years ago. You know, two years ago, I did a story on this about the question of where was the pickup for Al-Jazeera English. You know, there's so many more channels now with digital streams, and yet, they really haven't gotten that kind of distribution. They say they perhaps intend to re-launch that.
They've also done other stories that have been very relevant from the Middle East lately, even to American viewers, about revelations about negotiations in Israel and Palestine, about the toppling of the government in Tunisia, another autocratic regime. And yet, so far, there hasn't been this push to pick them up. They've been sort of going around it by being viewed online.
NORRIS: Always good to talk to you, David. Thank you very much.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
NORRIS: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
This weekend, the huge coal mining company, Massey Energy, agreed to a buyout. The deal is valued at more than $8 billion. Massey owns the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia, where 29 workers died last April. The company is known for amassing thousands of safety violations and for aggressively sparring with federal regulators.
NPR's Howard Berkes has been asking this question: Will anything change under new ownership?
HOWARD BERKES: The company paying billions for Massey Energy is Virginia-based Alpha Natural Resources, which already owns underground coal mines. But it's a marriage blending two very different companies, says Meredith Bandy, the coal equity analyst at BMO Capital Markets.
Ms. MEREDITH BANDY (Coal Equity Analyst, BMO Capital Markets): Alpha's management team tends to be professional and sort of restrained towards the regulators. Massey has historically been pretty aggressive in their dealings, maybe even contentious would be the right word. And Alpha certainly is not like that. They're much more low key.
BERKES: An NPR analysis of federal mine safety records shows that Massey has a rate of safety violations that is a third higher than the rate for Alpha. And Alpha's violations rate is 20 percent lower than the national rate. Alpha also has a senior safety and production executive named Allen Dupree, who not only worked for the Mine Safety and Health Administration, but has been buddies with MSHA's mine safety chief, Kevin Stricklin. Neither would talk today about their working relationship, but some consider it a plus.
Tony Oppegard is a former MSHA official who now represents coal miners in lawsuits against mining companies.
Mr. TONY OPPEGARD (Attorney): I would hope that that would help for the two sides to be able to sit down and discuss safety problems as opposed to the way it is with Massey that when MSHA intervenes, they're butting heads with Massey because Massey wants to do it their own way.
BERKES: Still, some are suspicious about possible cozy relationships between the regulated and the regulators. That leaves Phil Smith of the United Mine Workers Union cautious but optimistic about Alpha's takeover of Massey.
Mr. PHIL SMITH (United Mine Workers Union): You know, I don't think there's any coal company that likes regulation and I don't think there's any coal company that likes the enhanced regulations that are in the hallmark for the last several years. That said, Alpha has not been out front trying to wipe out increased enforcement. And they're also not trying to run away from their record like Massey has been trying to do over the past several years.
BERKES: Massey insisted it put safety first even as it amassed one of the worst safety records in the business. In a conference call with industry analysts today, Alpha's CEO Kevin Crutchfield said this about the company's approach to safety and regulation.
Mr. KEVIN CRUTCHFIELD (CEO, Alpha Natural Resources): I think we've demonstrated through our track record that we've created a fair amount of credibility and we would expect that to continue going forward.
BERKES: The key, some say, is whether Alpha replaces Massey executives and mine managers who may have trouble adapting. Alpha wouldn't say today who would stay or leave. The acquisition must still be approved by the boards of both companies and federal securities and monopoly regulators.
Howard Berkes, NPR News.
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